Margie Barkley: Dont make New Years Resolutions!

It is time to end all your New Year’s Resolutions.

Many people think about New Year’s Resolutions as the year draws to a close.

I’m not me, or at least not anymore.

New Year’s Resolutions

Although I have blogged many times about New Year’s Resolutions over the years, like 80+%, most of my personal resolutions have fallen by the wayside (read: ‘failed’) by February.

Many reasons why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work are many:

Inadequacy in defining goals:Insufficient time or resources to invest; Feeling overwhelmed by the task; Not caring enough about the goal and not knowing how to reach it.

According to me, the number one reason for failing to achieve a goal is the most common.

If, for example, I decided that I would like to draw a stick figure and that this year was going to be the year that I fulfilled my long-held dream to ‘paint landscapes’, then there are many things that I need to know before I can apply paint to paper or canvas.

Do you see the problem?

Instead of setting resolutions, I now choose the things I want to learn in each year. “Learn how landscape painting is done.”

It is much more enjoyable to learn how to do something than just deciding “To Do”.

To begin my learning journey, I found that rather than spending time searching for ‘learn more _____’ or learn how ______’ and then spending time looking through a random array of results, going straight to a source of educational courses delivers the information I need in a quick, cost-effective manner.

Udemy is one of these’sources to courses’. It’s an online learning platform that targets professionals and teaches mainly by experts in their field. Udemy was able to recruit corporate trainers to create courses for their employees.

Mashable stated that Udemy was a learning platform that is comparable to the classroom. This should be useful for students and teachers of all subjects.

There are over 100,000 courses available on the website as of 2018.

BusinessDesignDevelopmentHealth & FitnessIT @ SoftwareLifestyleMarketingMusicOffice ProductivityPersonal DevelopmentPhotographyTeaching & Academics

Each major category has its own list of sub-categories. You’ll find, for example, the Lifestyle category.

Arts & CraftsBeauty & MakeupFood & BeverageGamingGardeningPet Care & TrainingTravel

You don’t have to go through every category and sub-category to find a course at Udemy.

I searched for “how to paint landscapes” and found 1465 results. However, after I chose my preferred filters (Beginner English, 4.5+ rating, 3 to 6 hours) I was left with 43 options.

I was drawn to the ‘Developing an Eye for Landscape Composition’ course because it had 5,160 students, a rating of 4.7 from instructors and 1,192 reviews. It’s amazing that nearly 25% of students took the time to leave reviews and rate the instructor highly.

The course costs only $14.99, and includes:

Access to full lifetime of video3 hours on-demand

We’re traveling with very limited Internet bandwidth, so having unlimited lifetime access to the internet is a great bonus.

I will be taking photos of landscapes I may want to paint in the meantime.

However, I hope that you will also let go of your New Year’s Resolutions and instead invite yourself to learn something new. You will enjoy it, be excited about it, and most importantly, you will ENJOY learning!

Happy New Year!

Did you find the post useful and informative? Please share this post with others if you did! Please leave a comment below if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.

Cheers,

sig-ros