When I was much younger, New Year’s resolutions were almost as common as Christmas cards. People made lists: “I’m going to quit drinking, cut down on coffee, lose 25 pounds, lower my golf handicap, take up yoga, build a closet on the back porch and learn to speak Portuguese.” 

Stuff like that. 

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. You could consider it a “punch list,” like the ones contractors make of things that need to be fixed before a job is done. If you are as useless with real tools as I am and live mostly on a computer, you might think of New Year’s resolutions as Photoshopping a picture of your life, erasing the parts you don’t like and adding improvements. 

A quick email survey of Facebook “friends” and personal interviews with checkers at Publix showed 12 people not making resolutions, two who might “do something,” and one who answered with, “Is plastic okay?” 

It seems like instead of giving up bad habits, we gave up making lists. 

The problem is that it is tough to turn things around overnight. When people see that complete success is out of reach, they quit reaching for it. As the great philosophers Merle Haggard and George Jones said in song lyrics, “We must have been drunk when we said we’d quit drinking.” 

Asking more of yourself than you are likely to be able to deliver is a recipe for a bad attitude. One solution for that problem comes from an odd source: public education. 

Every August, those who run our schools engage in New School Year’s Resolutions, solemnly promising all sorts of happy smoke and nonsense that can’t possibly be delivered. No child will be left behind while we race to the top is just silly talk. I had one principal who once said with a straight face, “We are going to prioritize everything!” 

Promising stuff like that is not the solution to anything and never will be, but the school system does have one advantage over the average big talker: It keeps score.  

For a few seasons, we had something called AYP, which stood for “Adequate Yearly Progress.” It was a brilliant concept to apply to an impossible task. By collecting enough data and artfully crunching the numbers, we could show that even though the job didn’t get donewe did enough of it to get by. 

We were “good enough,” and while that is not exactly a lofty goal, it’s better than not having one at all.  Know you can’t get that closet built? Don’t throw the plans away in frustration. Collect the lumber and borrow a saw and resolve to start hammering next year.Portuguese too much for you? Learn a few words. 

What better time to start being a better you than right now? And that goes double for us older folks. The biggest cop-out I can think of is “it’s a little late in the game for me,” like you don’t have enough time left to improve.  

You’ve got all day today, same as everybody else.  As for me, at the age of 74, I’m taking up poetry: 

We’re a whole lot older than we used to be, 
The time has really been flying 
We can’t do all the things that we formerly did 
But there’s nothing to stop us from trying 
Just because we’ve had to slow down a bit 
Is no reason for feeling bereft 
It’s not that we don’t still have bright futures 
There’s just not that much future left 

And finally, use-o ou perca-o! (That’s Portuguese for “use it or lose it.”)