Be A Better Man in 2010

It’s isn’t just the end of a year; it’s the end of a decade. And a pretty significant decade at that. Ten years ago, it was New Year’s Eve 2000! You were dancing to Prince and laughing off the threat of Y2K (even if you were secretly a little apprehensive about it) and the party rocked all night long. Then you woke up into a hangover and a Bloody Mary and a fresh new year. Then that year flew by, and nine more years after it, and now here we are: New Year’s Eve 2010.

We live in a culture that prizes youth, and because of this, we’re conditioned for nostalgia. We see the time that’s behind us as time lost, full of opportunities that are now lost too. And at the end of a decade, we feel it tenfold. Well, at AM we say: Enough! Enough sniffling over what could have been. It’s time for a mind-shift. And here’s how we’re going to initiate it: take the closest piece of paper and on it write down three things that you’ve accomplished since that New Year's Eve party 10 years ago. Maybe you got a promotion that you fought for and deserved. Maybe you mustered up the balls to approach the woman who is now your girlfriend. Whatever their scale or significance, we just want you to write down three things that you did to make your life better.

You’ve accomplished a lot more than these three things in the past 10 years. If we gave you the time to do so, you could expand that list to 30 accomplishments. But we’re done dwelling on the past. We’re in the middle of a mind-shift! So now that you’ve recalled your abilities to actualize the goals that you set out, in order to be the executor of your own self-improvement, it’s time to think about how you’re going apply those powers in the year ahead. Flip that piece of paper over, and write down the one change you want to see in your life in 2010. The change that’s going to make you a Better Man.

Over the 12 days of the holidays, we’re publishing our Better Man series. Each day we’ll provide a guide toward implementing one of the changes that we know our guys want to pursue. We hope that one of them is your change. And if none of them are, we’re pretty sure your Better Man guide is probably hiding somewhere in the AskMen.com archives. Just send me an e-mail at jamesb@askmen.com and I’ll point you to it. And if we don’t have that guide on the site, our editors will work with our writers to prepare it for you, and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

At AM, it’s our job to help our readers change and become Better Men. And when it comes to positive change, there’s always no time like the present, but only occasionally a time like the start of a new year -- and rarely a time like the start of a new decade.

[Excerpt via AskMen]