No December newsletter is complete without a word on New Year's resolutions. You know how it works - it's the end of December, you find yourself looking into the mirror, realizing that unlike what it said on the cover of that moisturizer, you're not getting any younger. So you take a vow to lose weight/gain height/fall in love by the end of next year. But for some reason, three weeks later, you're back at work and everything seems to be the same.

So if you really want to make next year your best, forget about resolutions and use the next 30 days to set something in motion. How? Check out these three proven strategies:

1. Experiment more often
When Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, investigated how people make dramatic career changes, she was surprised to find out that it had little to do with listing all the things you were good at and matching them with what jobs are available in the market.

Instead, Ibarra found that successful transitioners took a completely different approach: "Start by changing what you do. Try different paths. Take action, and then use the feedback from your actions to figure out what you think, feel, and want. Don't try to analyze or plan your way into a new career. Conventional strategies advocated by self-assessment manuals and traditional career counselors would have you start by looking inside."

--> Read Ibarra's Harvard Business Review article "How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career".

2. Meet weird people
Albert Einstein said once that a problem cannot be solved in the same consciousness that produced it. The challenge is that short of taking recreational drugs, how do we actually view a problem with a different consciousness? The answer lies in other people, preferably those we have nothing in common with.

The best way to expose yourself to new ways of thinking is to meet "weird and crazy" people and hear what their world looks like. No, I'm not talking about booking a visit to your local psychiatric ward, but taking someone you wouldn't normally hang out with for a cup of coffee. Ask them what a typical day in their life looks like. You'd be amazed where these meetings lead.

--> If you don't have any "weird" people in your contact folder, you can always find someone here.

3. Use the regret minimization framework
As the year draws to a close, many of us are thinking about the best way to make important decisions in our lives. Consider the technique Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, took before founding the company ten years ago.

When Bezos told his friends he was going to leave his cushy job as a Wall Street banker, everyone thought he was crazy. When he resigned, his boss took him for a long walk through central park and urged him to reconsider. Faced with one of the toughest decisions in his life, Bezos developed the Regret Minimalization Framework. "I projected myself to age 80 and I looked back...and I said, 'What I want to have done at that point is to have minimized all the regrets in my life.' When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff. I knew when I was 80 that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn't something you worry about when you're 80 years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way, in the regret minimization framework, it was incredibly easy to make the decision."

So take the time to make a few small changes in your life before the year ends. You'll be surprised how quickly they'll pay off.