Insights on realizing New Year’s resolutions have generously trickled down from some of the wealthiest people in the world.
After experiencing a deficit of luck over the past couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many are finding themselves reluctant to start off 2022 on a positive note. Let alone with the goal of taking on a New Year’s resolution.
The inner circle of the world’s most affluent people is less daunted. After all, the 10 wealthiest individuals collectively made over $400 billion last year, proving that fortune is made—not received.
In the spirit of prosperity, they hope to share their blessings in the form of guidance in these trying times.
Here’s some timeless advice from leading billionaires guaranteed to pay off in the new year and beyond.
Grow and Have a Growth Mindset
“Try to be useful,” Elon Musk advised others.
In a December 2021 interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Musk offered his 2022 resolution for the youth in particular.
“You do things that are useful to your fellow human beings, to the world. It’s very hard to be useful…you are contributing more than you consume,” he said.
According to the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, this meant attempting to have a “positive net contribution” to society.
“If you live a useful life, that is a good life. A life worth having lived.”
In doing so, he encouraged people to read a lot of books and ingest as much information as possible in order to develop decent general knowledge.
Musk also encouraged a “grow the pie” mindset rather than a “non-zero-sum” mentality where the only way to get ahead is by taking things from others.
“It’s much better to work on adding to the economic pie,” he concluded.
Even Dream Jobs are Hard Work
Jeff Bezos similarly addressed the young generation to aid their future careers.
“People have very high standards for how they want their work life to be… If you can get your work life to be where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing, because very few people ever achieve that,” the Amazon founder and executive chairman said.
He explained that everything including dream jobs comes with “overhead,” or undesirable aspects. “Every job comes with pieces you don’t like and we need to say, ‘That’s part of it.'”
Bezos stressed that the youth should really think about their choices even before they start their careers, saying that decisiveness and hard work determine one’s future more than any gifts that they possess like good looks or academic prowess.
“Make sure that you are focused on something you’re passionate about,” he said. “Whatever it is that you want to do, there’s going to be risk in your life and risk is a necessary component of progress.”
See the Brighter Side of Every Situation
“I’ve never been a big New Year’s resolution person,” Bill Gates wrote in his 2021 Year in Review blog post.
“I don’t have any specific goal in mind for 2022 (although I guess I still have a couple more weeks to think of one). But what I do hope is that next year is a lot more settled than this one.”
Acknowledging that 2021 was an “incredibly hard year,” the Microsoft co-founder was still able to find and list reasons for optimism in 2022.
He wished that people and their loved ones could find a way to create new routines as they enter a post-pandemic new normal.
“The world has adapted to big disruptions before, and we’ll do it again.”
Take a Longer-Term Focus
As of January 2020, Mark Zuckerberg discontinued his annual New Year’s resolution that he would traditionally refer to as a “personal challenge.”
“Every new year of the last decade I set a personal challenge,” wrote the Meta (formerly Facebook) co-founder.
“My goal was to grow in new ways outside my day-to-day work running Facebook. These led me to learn Mandarin, code an AI assistant for my home, read more books, run a lot more, learn to hunt and cook, and get more comfortable with public speaking.”
Zuckerberg said that while he was happy to do these annual challenges over the past decade, it was time to do something different.
“This decade I’m going to take a longer term focus,” he wrote. “Rather than having year-to-year challenges, I’ve tried to think about what I hope the world and my life will look like in 2030, so I can make sure I’m focusing on those things.”
For him, important considerations for the next decade include generational change, decentralizing opportunity, and new forms of governance.
Give Me Five
Warren Buffett’s “5/25 Rule” is a commonly cited method to achieve anything from personal goals to New Year’s resolutions.
Simply put, list down 25 goals, rank them in order of importance, focus on achieving the top five goals, then eliminate the rest.
Prioritizing change that matters most allows one to maximize their time and make feasible, realistic steps toward success.
Photo by Heisenberg Media via Wikimedia Commons
