Everyone loves Christmas. Its more awesome than New Year’s Day, because Christmas is like the Friday night of the entire year. It marks the start of everyone’s favorite week. The week where you either don’t go to office, or show up at a half-empty one because even your boss and your boss’ boss is on a vacation. New Year’s Day is like the Sunday night of the year, preceding the Monday blues. It marks the end of the holiday — which makes me wonder what the hell is so happy about happy new year.

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Okay, I normally don’t do this New Year’s Resolution thing — if you refer to my posts over the past three years, there was no such thing. Generally, I think that 31/12/x isn’t much different from 01/01/x+1. The sad reality is that if you were an incompetent and hopeless the year before, one year isn’t going to change much.

But when I do have a New Year’s Resolution, its bloody hardcore. In 2008, I resolved not to skip a day of school — which I didn’t, and which is fucking amazing in acsi. No, seriously, you have no idea how many useless days/events/classes there were, and I didn’t even take an MC because of my almost jewish adherence to my resolution. (I can’t remember what the hell possessed me to make such a stupid one tho). By this point, I’m betting that nobody actually believes that there was a year where I did not miss a day of school…

But my resolution has gotten more intense. My new year’s resolution is to be able to concentrate this year. Now that sounds damn ambiguous. More importantly, its damn ambitious. It’s almost paradoxical: in order to concentrate, I’ll need to concentrate. But nonetheless, it is necessary.  Concentration is fundamental to the machinery of the mind. It is most important for efficiency, and it makes the difference between toiling aimlessly, and working effortlessly. For the next half a year at least, I’ll be damn hard-pressed for time. Either I become efficient again, or I goodlucktakecare.

I used to have some degree of this, but I completely lost it by now. In civil servant terms, I have a few KPIs to measure this. I have a half formed methodology to go about this in mind also — the most basic of it requires willpower and avoiding distractions. I probably won’t have the concentration level of a yogi, but I just need enough to get by.

But anyway, for those people planning to get a New Year’s Resolution, or already having one. Here’s a song by Mick Jagger, from the movie Alfie that stars Jude Law. Yes kids, jagger as in the mOoOoOoOooves likes jagger.

OLD HABITS DIE HARD.

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