I get excited about my dreams…I can’t wait for them to come true. At the beginning of every year, people get excited about their dreams—they have a long list of things they want to do and they want to do them all at the same time. However, having your dreams and working on your dreams are two different activities, and should be separated.

Dreams and resolutions are exciting and fun to think about, but achieving them takes hard work, sacrifice and understanding the process of getting there. I have been a victim of this for years. I have been frustrated about where I was and would get excited about where I wanted to go, but the excitement only lasted a couple of days or weeks. No matter how exciting something is in the beginning, it becomes routine and monotonous. Even if it becomes boring, you have to execute. Here are my thoughts about why New Year’s resolutions die.

#1. Your friends and loved ones love you the way you are. Jim Rohn said that you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. If you change your habits, your friends might miss you and even make fun of you. If you want to lose weight and you always split a dessert with your best friends, when you change the habit, your friends are going to miss their dessert buddy or their shopping buddy or their stay out late buddy. Some people don’t support us no matter what. They support you when you have bad habits. Even I’m guilty of this one.

#2. Momentum is a powerful tool if you use it the right way. But it takes an understanding of how it works. When you change your habits, you slowly see results, but when you let go of the habits, momentum is still working but if you don’t feed the process, the momentum will fade away and your left with what you started with. If you’re on a diet for a couple of weeks and you begin to feel better and you decide one cookie won’t hurt, as soon as you put that cookie in your mouth, you’re slowing that momentum instead of building it up. It’s true that one cookie will not hurt, but it’s a gateway to the old life and when you make an excuse for that one cookie then you can make an excuse for that second or third cookie. Bottom line, cookies can ruin your life. You need to make success a lifestyle.

#3. Building on #2…It takes a while to get going. People want to achieve results right away. In my business, what I’m working on now is going to pay off next year. What I worked on a year ago is just now starting to pay off. What I am writing right now might now get published next year or maybe in two years.

Achieving our dreams and goals should be important. My dream is to work hard and my work has taken me to places that I could never imagine. It takes a process, it takes discipline, it takes money, it takes getting knocked down, and it doesn’t happen because you changed one little habit in the first couple of weeks in January (sorry to hurt your feelings).