My parents are Type A personalities. In fact, they need their own terms because they put most Type A’s to shame. They’re Super Alpha A’s, perhaps. But I am not. I am a solid and quite happy Type B. I’m relatively laid-back, quiet, I hate competition with others… you know the deal.

Needless to say, this drove my parents crazy when I was younger. I think they worried that since I lacked a fierce competitive spirit, I would amount to nothing. So they tried their best to lure me to the Dark Side: They prompted and prodded and encouraged and tried to imbue me with what my mother calls “fire in the belly.” But I didn’t want the damn fire; I told her to keep it. That was actually my response to a lot of their advice. Well, at least in the passive-aggressive sense of smiling and nodding my head in agreement while crossing my fingers behind my back. However, one thing they did manage to teach me is goal-setting. Because being a Type B doesn’t mean that I lack motivation. I compete with myself all the time, in fact. If we don’t challenge ourselves, we can never improve. And so goal-setting has always been important to me.

We’re in mid-November now and there’s no denying it: winter is here. Thanksgiving is next week and Christmas is virtually around the corner. Which means — you guessed it! –it’s almost New Year’s Eve… a time to think about new beginnings and, of course, resolutions. Every year, I promise myself that I won’t make a New Year’s Resolution. They’re silly; there’s no reason I should make myself a promise on December 31st because it’s just another day. But every year, I buckle under the peer pressure (or maybe it’s the champagne fog) and make a resolution. Or two. Maybe three. Never more than four. Except sometimes when I make five.

New Year’s Eve is a great excuse for me because my over-optimism and incredible hopefulness are culturally supported. There is no room for pessimists or killjoys. It’s a day when we eat sauerkraut for good luck, get drunk on champagne, and morph into kiss whores at the stroke of midnight. And we get to make all sorts of promises to ourselves, determined that we will keep them.

I made three resolutions last year and, for the first time in my life, I’ve kept all three. I feel like such a grown up. I feel a sense of accomplishment. It’s a great feeling and I’d really like to feel it more often. Because setting and achieving one’s own goals is very empowering, isn’t it? To take control of our own lives is a very liberating feeling. We are the teller of our own fortune, the charter of our own course, the puppeteer of our own marionette. [I’m prone to wax metaphoric. My apologies.] We really do decide what we do or don’t do.

That’s why I like to set goals. When I write a goal down, it reminds me that if I don’t do something, it’s my own damn fault. I too often find myself placing blame on others or even on things for why I can’t do something. But let’s be honest: extenuating circumstances are usually nonsense. They’re how we rationalize and excuse ourselves so that our conscience can be free again. It’s a tough pill to swallow when we realize that we are the only ones responsible for our own failures, and formalized goal-setting makes me do that.

I look forward to this New Year’s. First of all, I’ll be celebrating it in Costa Rica which is, coincidentally, the fulfillment of one of last year’s promises. But more importantly, I get to make a whole new list of goals. I get to dream new dreams and envision all the goodness that 2007 will bring. I will hold myself to those my new goals because I owe that to myself. We all deserve to achieve our dreams.