First published through The Paris News on Jan. 2, 2017. The article can be found on their website at http://theparisnews.com/opinion/article_af85408c-d108-11e6-a728-0f8f7d48ba3f.html and was backdated.

Today marks day two to this new year. Have you already broken the New Year’s resolution you so hopefully set for yourself?

It’s not a bad thing to have broken a New Year’s resolution.

According to Time Magazine, the top 10 commonly broken New Year’s resolutions are: to lose weight and get fit; quit smoking; learn something new; eat healthier and diet; get out of debt and save money; spend more time with family; travel to new places; be less stressed; to volunteer and to drink less.

I’m going to challenge one of these commonly broken resolutions — learning something new, in a sense.

Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

With today’s technology, there shouldn’t be a reason to not learn something new every day, but I tend to do other things than learn. I’ve caught myself just watching TV — binge watching the next show that everyone is enveloped in. Who doesn’t love “The Walking Dead?” I’ve been catching up with TWD for the past three weeks due to being so behind on the episodes.

TED Talks are my kryptonite. If I can find a really inspiring TED Talk, I can sit and watch them continuously. With the help of TED’s related feature, you could start learning about ‘How to start a movement.’

There was a previous TED Talk titled “The first 20 hours, how to learn anything.” Within this talk Josh Kaufman discussed just that, how to learn anything. During his research on how long it takes for people to learn something new, he discovered it takes about 10,000 hours to learn something new. Kaufman said 10,000 hours is a full time job for five years. However, Kaufman also said the 10,000 hours came from studies for professional levels. He wanted to know how long it would take to do something good, not great. In which he found out it only takes about 20 hours to be satisfactory.

When I learn something, I want to do the best I can, but, I feel like there’s trial and error within not just the learning phase, but also the doing phase. I don’t care to be the next Mozart or Picasso. I want to learn how to do things for the fun of learning and doing. Kaufman said it only takes 20 hours to become good at something.

I play the ukulele, but I’m no Jake Shimabukuro playing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It comes down to how much time is invested in playing it. The more effort put into playing could show much more improvement.

My New Year’s resolution, like many others’, is to learn something new. To learn something new, in a sense, because I already know how to play the ukulele but, like any other instrument, there’s always something new to be learned.

In the words of Barney Stinson, “Challenge accepted.”