You really mean it this year. It’s time for a change, and you’re serious this time. You’re going to turn off the news, set clearer goals, get focused and generally do it different in 2012.

And you will. Right?

My bathroom mirror is directly across from the glass door on my shower. When you’re middle-aged, this is a bad idea. I caught my reflection one morning and screamed like a teenage girl meeting Justin Bieber while sitting in a hair salon with foil on her hair. My wife burst in, asking what was wrong.

I shrieked, “There’s a furry pregnant woman in the shower!”

Time for a change. So what did I do?

Naturally, I continued the same habits that’d turned me into a furry pregnant woman, while waiting for something to magically change while saying, “I’ve got to stop this.”

This went on until one day I was standing on the scale, cursing. “How did this happen?” I asked, to no one in particular. Then I replied, “You know exactly how this happened, fool. You were here for the whole thing. Every biscuit, every cookie, every slice of pumpkin pie.” We call that affirming the truth.

No matter how we arrived at 2012, we can’t ask, “How did I get here?” We know how we got here. We were there when we decided to wait it out on reform. We were there when we decided to wait for the midterms and stimulus to kick in. Indeed, we’ve been waiting for Republicans and Democrats and economic conditions to change for the last couple of years. But here’s the problem with waiting for someone else to change things: What if they never show up?

We can’t wait for someone else to come along, but neither can we change it all at once. We have to do it different, one decision at a time; one day at a time. Cookie or carrot. Biscuit or broccoli. Simple. The challenge is we don’t see the results right away, so we get fooled into thinking the decision and the day don’t matter. Until one day we’re shrieking in the shower.

One year from today, things will be exactly the same as they are today, unless you do something different today. You don’t drop 100 pounds at once. You do one thing different each day, and the cumulative effect one year from now is astounding.

What different outcome do you want this year? What’s one thing you can do different today to make it happen? Just one thing. It won’t seem like a big deal today—making five extra sales calls is never a big deal in the moment—but the cumulative effect of five extra calls a day for an entire year? Well, that’s a whole different kind of shriek.