- Moomin Exhibition: THE ART AND THE STORY
- Timeless Conversations 2020: Voices from Japanese Art of the Past and Present
- Watch Snoopy movies at home during the Golden Week.
- The New York Food Film Festival 2020 has been cancelled amid coronavirus fears.
- Bob Dylan is coming to Japan
- McDonald’s Japan welcomes 2020 spring with new strawberry frappes
- All-you-can-eat strawberry desserts in 100 minutes.
- “Japan’s Cuisine, Nature, and Wisdom”- Exploring the Past and Future of Japanese Cuisine at the National Museum of Nature and Science
- The World of Shoen Uemura’s paintings of beautiful women
- Treasures from Budapest
- Strawberry and Chocolate Fair at Ikea Japan
- Your Guide to Tokyo’s Fun Ice Skating Rinks
- Yokohama lights up 500,000 leds this year.
- Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow
- Egg & Spuma’s Halloween Offering is A Cute Witch Burger
- Strictly Come Drawing
Why New Year’s resolutions fail.
The majority of New Year’s resolutions fail for the same reason that so many businesses do – because people let their strategy limit their vision.
Here’s a simple example.
Jeremy determines what he will do for his vacation based on the fact that he has only 50,000 yen and can’t take more than a week off.
This seems very realistic, however it will likely limit Jeremy to futon-surfing around Japan at friend’s houses.
If, on the other hand, Jeremy first spends some time thinking about the kind of vacation, he really wants to take without any consideration of his current resources, he might identify that his dream vacation would be a month spent cycling around Europe.
If Jeremy is focused only on his strategies (i.e. his current available time and money), he has limited options. If he identifies his ideal vision, he can then identify the financial and time resources he needs and create strategies for achieving them. This might mean that he stays in town for a few long weekends to put in some extra hours at work and sets aside a bit of money from each pay cheque to finance his trip, but ultimately, having his dream vacation will be much more fulfilling than many little futon-surfing compromise vacations.
The same principle applies in business. We were hired by a textile manufacturing client a few years back to help with their annual strategic planning. They had revenues of about $7 million annually and had grown about 12% each year over the last 5 years. Their strategic planning for the coming year was focused on ensuring another 12% growth. We shook things up by asking not only what their company would need to look like to double or triple their revenues in the next three years but also what it would need to look like to be a place that they were excited to work in.
By the end of the day, not only did they have concrete realistic strategies in place to grow the company to $30 million, they were crystal clear on where their current bottlenecks to their growth were and how to address them.
Many people would argue that keeping your dreams realistic means more likely to achieve them. Research shows that the opposite tends to be true. The smaller and more realistic the goals, the easier it is to put off working towards them. Big goals with ambitious deadlines spark people to begin taking action immediately and motivate them to keep moving forward consistently over the long term.
In some cases, it may take a bit of time to come up with workable strategies for achieving big dreams, but often, it doesn’t take extra time – just the ability to harness some extra creativity.
The good news is that when the dream you are working towards is truly compelling, you are more likely to persevere until the creative strategic insight occurs and persist long enough to overcome any barriers that might get in the way of discovering and executing these strategies.
