Like a field of fresh, fallen snow, the new year arrives as a blank slate, unbroken.

It’s full of possibilities. Anything could happen this year. This could be the year where all the work pays off and all your dreams come true. The year is waiting for you, urging you to get started.

For a moment, though, just take a step back and consider the possibilities.

There’s something about the New Year that captures our imagination. For this one, brief moment, the real world has no control over this feeling. There have been no challenges, no setbacks. There’s only potential. There’s a year out there, ready for us to take it on.

There’s something in the human psyche that grabs on to the New Year, that yearns for that clean slate. Except for year-end bookkeeping, there’s no real difference between December 31 and January 1. The temperature is the same, the days aren’t appreciably longer and your staff and customers are the same people they were the day before.

And yet…

It’s possible to feel too full of potential, of course. There will be a lot of broken resolutions and reconsidered goals before this first month of 2018 plays out. Much of this comes from trying to correct mistakes or missed opportunities from years before. “If I had known then what I know now” is the impulse we feel as we chart a course into the future. We’re wise to take past lessons and apply them to our present and future, but we also need to keep an eye out for new experiences — opportunities we haven’t seen before — and not be locked into past behavior. The future will make demands on us and offer us chances we never expected.

Examining the year that was, with its successes and failures, is part of preparing for what comes next. For a moment, though, stop and take a breath — just for a moment — and consider all that this new year has to offer.

It’s waiting for you.

Now go and get it.

From all of us at AutoSuccess, we wish you the very best in 2018, and we’ll be with you every step of the way as you make the new year yours.