For a Californian, staying in Sydney is like living in the future. As I write this, it’s well past midday on January 2nd, but still the evening of the 1st back home. When I FaceTime with friends and family on the West Coast, they’re always a day behind. They haven’t experienced the day I’m living yet! It’s pretty wild, and makes you really think about time and the reality of living on a gigantic sphere. As they say, time is relative. What’s today for me might be tomorrow for you.

This seems especially relevant at this time of year; we reflect on 2019 with nostalgia and rumination. Sometimes a friend’s birthday in March seems more recent than an election in September—our memories and perceptions are subjective and determinant on the meaning we attribute to them. Maybe we’re surprised with how much progress we’ve made on a goal, or startled when we realize how long a particular project took. When we look back on the past year, it’s all relative.

Which thus brings us to the most important quality we can focus on when trying to achieve change: consistency. Those who lost weight in 2019 did so by working at it every single day. People who did well at work weren’t smarter or more privileged or lucky—they consistently worked hard throughout the year. Whatever our goals are for 2020 and beyond, if we want to accomplish them, we must chip away at them consistently. Because when we look back on them a year later, time will warp our conception of the effort involved, of the struggles we pushed through, of the tedious slog we endured. It will all seem different.

We can better ourselves and our world in 2020. We just can’t let our limited sense of time detract from our desires. It only takes resolve, and some consistency. We can change the world.