So, 2008, huh? A new year. Time for new resolutions, eh? Or — at least — a new look at the resolutions from last year. I’ve refined them a little this year, by which I mean I’ve dropped out the ones that seemed too ambiguous…what exactly did I mean by “Spend more time with friends and family?” That’s not a good resolution to follow. Spend one night a week hanging out with friends. That’s concrete, at least. Not something I’m actually likely to do, but a good idea.

I went out yesterday and bought a new moleskine for the new year. I started out “saving” last year’s for more momentous or memorable things but eventually realized that that was silly. I’m going to try and use this year’s as a additional memory module and write down nearly everything in it. Towards the fall, I started taking notes from my Data Reviews in the notebook and it was nice to be able to flip back to recall just what we talked about a month previous rather than just relying on my fuzzy memory. There it was, in black and white. Well, blue and white, as I tend to use a blue pen most of the time. Anyway.

The funny and talented writer A.J. Jacobs writes in his new book, The Year of Living Biblically (which I’ve just started reading but is fantastic! Go buy a copy today! And get The Know-It-All while you’re at it! Confidental to A.J.: did that make your Google search? Can I get an autographed copy?), about the idea of cognitive dissonance. That is, acting like a certain person can tend to actually change you into that person after time, so that you’re not acting any more. You just are. Sort of like Method Acting, but for real.

I bring this up to remind myself (primarily) of how I’m going to try to follow my resolutions. I want to be the sort of person who is at the lab from 8 in the morning until 6 at night, making significant progress towards graduating each day, but I’m not him. To become him, I’ll start acting like him and see how the acting transforms me. It’s an experiment and I’m a scientist. Let’s see how it goes.

As an aside, that’s actually not what I thought the term cognitive dissonance meant, but he is the Know-It-All, after all, so who am I to argue?