Every December, Raj, like many other people, starts to wonder what his New Year resolutions are going to be, and more importantly, how long is he going to be able to keep them.  In 2010, he was able to keep them for a total of 22 days. So much for all the talk about a new habit taking 21 days to form.

This year, however, Raj is determined to hold on to his New Year resolutions, and he is determined to do whatever it takes to do that. Luckily for him, it is really not that hard to hold on to New Year Resolutions – all it takes is a little planning and some determination.

1. Choose with Care. When you make a new year resolution, be sure that it is something that you want, and something that fits into your lifestyle. Don’t make a resolution just because it is something that is in fashion. It should be something that you really want to do. Most resolutions get broken because people choose too difficult a task for themselves.

Also, do not create a long list of resolutions. What is the point of having a long list of resolutions if you are not going to keep even one of them.  Keep the list of resolutions manageable.

2. Be ready when the time comes. Do not wait till the 31st to start working on your resolutions.  Start planing early, and begin working on them as soon as you can, so that by the time 1st comes you are ready for holding on to your resolutions.

Vijay found this trick quite useful in sticking to his resolution of quitting smoking. Every year he used to resolve to quit smoking. The first couple of days were always hard, and he would smoke a cigarette within  the first week of the New Year, and his resolution to quit smoking would go straight out of the window. This year he decided to quit smoking in the last week of the old year itself. Even though, he did smoke a couple of cigarettes during that last week, but by the time the New Year arrived he was ready to be smoke free.

3. Share it with the World. If you share your resolutions with as many people as you can, you are more likely to stick to your resolutions. The reason for this being twofold: One, you are going to try harder in order to avoid losing face in front of so many people, and two, you will have a larger number of people who will be reminding you of your resolutions and who will try to keep you on track towards achieving your goals.

4. Focus on the results. Every time you tend to become waver, and become weak, do not try to fight the urge to break the resolution, because as they say, “what you resist, persists”. Instead, focus on the reason for choosing that resolution in the first place. Then, focus on the result that you will get if you are able to stick to your resolutions.

5. Find a Resolution Buddy. If you have a friend or a relative who is facing similar problems with holding on to his New Year resolutions, make him your resolution buddy. Share your resolutions with each other, and then take responsibility for helping each other in sticking to your resolutions. You will not only be able to stick to your resolutions, but you might also end up strengthening your relations with that person.

So, have you started working on the list of your New Year Resolutions yet?

(Image Courtesy: enimal from sxc.hu)

Come 1st April, and many minds begin to work extra hard to design devious schemes to fool their friends, colleagues, and even strangers. 1st April is that one day of the year where you can make fun of people, and get away with it without risking any grievous physical injury.  At the same time, you need to be careful about believing what you hear or read on this day, because you never know when you might be taken for a ride.

Following is a list of some of the pranks played on the world by institutions we can usually trust on any other day of the year.

In 2000, Google announced a new service for smarter and faster searching – The Google Mentalplex. The service even came with simple, but detailed instructions on how to use it:

Remove hat and glasses.
Peer into MentalPlex circle. DO NOT MOVE YOUR HEAD.
Project mental image of what you want to find.
Click or visualize clicking within the MentalPlex circle.

That was not all. Google had set up an FAQ page and an illustrations for correct usage page too.

Again in 2007, Google announced a new service called Gmail Paper. A service where you could request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and Google would send it to you in the mail. Was there a limit on how many mails you could get printed. The Answer from the Google people was:

You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.

I don’t know about how many people actually believed that, but I remembering opening the Gmail home page, reading about Gmail Paper and wondering: “Could this be for real?”

BBC is one of the most trusted News service in the whole wide world, yet even they have not hesitated from fooling their audience on April Fool’s day every now and then.

In 1967, BBC Radio 2 made an announcement through the British Astronomer Patrick Moore about a once in an lifetime event where Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, and at 9:47 the planets would be so aligned that they would lessen the gravitational force of the Earth. If someone were to jump in the air at that moment, BBC claimed, they would be able to feel the effect of this planetary alignment. BBC later received many calls from people claiming to have felt the effect. It is reported that one woman even claimed that she and her eleven friends actually rose form their chairs and floated in the air.

On April 1, 2008 BBC reported that Filmmaker and Writer Terry Jones had made the remarkable discovery of penguins that could fly. The news was aired as a part of BBC’s new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. The report came complete with a video footage that showed the penguins flying. The presenter, Terry Jones, described the event as, “It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.”

The penguins were reportedly flying to the rain forests of South America where they would ” spend the winter basking in the tropical Sun.”

On 31st March, 1989 people driving on a highway outside London reported seeing an UFO. Police were called and they dutifully came to investigate. The UFO finally landed in a field on the outskirts of London and a small man emerged from the craft. The man turned out to be Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Records. He had planned the prank in such a way that he was supposed to land in London’s Hyde Park on April 1. A rowdy gust of wind, however, blew him off track and he ended up in Surrey.

In 1982, The Daily Mail ran a report about how a local manufacturer had managed to sell 10,000 “rogue bras” to women. The support wire in these bras was made out of a kind of copper that was originally meant for use in fire alarms. This copper, when it came into contact with nylon and body heat, produced static electricity that interfered with television and radio broadcasts. The news resulted in quite a bit of inconvenience to many female employees of broadcasting stations.

(Sources:
Information: http://wikipedia.com, http://www.museumofhoaxes.com
Images : Internet)