New Year Momentum
Here's why I believe you should set new year resolutions, even when most people (including me) fail to achieve them.
“When I look back on resolutions of improvement and amendment which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity; when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.”—Samuel Johnson
I have been writing down my annual goals since 2015 (and publishing my annual reviews since 2017). Like most people, I don’t succeed in achieving all my goals every year. But year after year, I review my year and set goals for the following year. (I will be publishing my 2024 annual review shortly!)
The end of each year is, I find, the best time to reflect on our lives, think about what we want to achieve, and set down some goals.
Time momentum
While time is a fundamental dimension of the universe, the way we measure time is a human construct. We created timekeeping to organize our daily lives, track agricultural cycles, and schedule religious rituals. We can measure but not make or stop time. We only go with its flow. And there’s something beautiful about it.
My former colleague, Buffer’s Chief of Staff, Carolyn Kopprasch wrote this beautiful tribute to time back at the end of 2015, and I have remembered it since:
Tonight, we celebrate time.
It seems a bit silly, a bit arbitrary, to choose this day over any other to celebrate the passing of time. But I can’t think of much that deserves celebration more than time. In my experience, it’s one of the greatest teachers, and the greatest healer. We try to rush the minutes and slow the years, and succeed at neither.
I’m taking a moment tonight to thank time for never obeying my commands. To celebrate what’s passed and what’s ahead.
Thanks, 2015. Here’s to you, ’16!
The turn of a new year is nothing more than us collectively deciding, “Alright, enough of this year. Time for a new year!”
Yet there is something so powerful about that proclamation, about 1 January. It’s like saying, “Even if 2024 was a terrible year, it is over. And we should let that go. 2025 is here, and we can make things better.” Something about the start of a new year gives us the urge to explore, to change, and to grow. When we see people around us reflect on the past year and set plans for the new year, we get infected by the enthusiasm too. Don’t resist it; get swept up by it. I have always felt it’s helpful to make use of this momentum—as irrational as it may be—to try and push our lives forward. Besides major life changes, nothing seems to give us the same drive.
Ryan Holiday also wrote about this in his recent blog post, The Secret To Better Habits In 2025:
While there is nothing magical about the new year or nothing special about being halfway through a decade, there can be something powerful in these artificial constructs, in deciding to mark a turning point. There’s power in rituals, in moments that encourage us to pause, reflect, and reset. Even the Stoics embraced this. Seneca is said to have begun each year with a plunge into the icy Tiber River, a bracing ritual to wash away the old and prepare for the new.
Failing and trying again
I have my fair share of missing my goals. Most notably, I had planned to write and publish essays for eight of the last 10 years (the exceptions were 2021 and 2022 when I switched jobs and when I left my job to found a startup respectively). I only hit my target in one of the eight years—2017, when my full-time job was being the main writer for the Buffer blog and I published 52 long-form blog posts. And yet, every year, I find myself setting a writing goal.
Why bother trying again and again, even though I always fail?
Because self-improvement is about being consistent rather than being perfect. James Clear wrote about the danger of falling into an all-or-nothing mindset:
Once you realize that consistency is essential for success it can be easy to obsess over becoming flawlessly consistent.
For example…
Trying to get fit? It’s easy to convince yourself that if you don’t follow your diet perfectly, then you’ve failed.
Want to meditate each day? Beware of focusing so much on never missing a day that you stress over sticking to your meditation schedule.
Looking to become a successful writer? You can quickly brainwash yourself into thinking that successful authors write every single day without fail. (The same goes for artists and athletes of all kinds.)
In other words, it’s really easy to confuse being consistent with being perfect. And that is a problem because there is no safety margin for errors, mistakes, and emergencies. (You know, the type of things that make you a normal human being.)
Cutting yourself some slack becomes even more important when we consider the science behind habit formation and continual improvement. Research shows that, regardless of the habit that you are working to build, missing a single day has no measurable impact on your long-term success. (More on that here.)
In other words, it is all about average speed, not maximum speed. Daily failures are like red lights during a road trip. When you’re driving a car, you’ll come to a red light every now and then. But if you maintain a good average speed, you’ll always make it to your destination despite the stops and delays along the way.
Falling down on this self-improvement path is inevitable. What is more important is that we get up. As James Clear wrote, “Planning to fail doesn’t mean that you expect to fail, but rather than you know what you will do and how you will get back on track when things don’t work out.” Keep wanting to improve is admirable, even if we keep failing.
And, ultimately, is the real goal to write 30 essays in 30 days or to form a writing habit? To cut sugar for a month or to not crave sugar? To bring my family on a vacation or to be a loving husband and dad? The former is a means to the latter. Even if we don’t succeed this year or the next, as long as we don’t stop, we are making progress towards our real goals.
Perhaps it is even desirable that we don’t always succeed immediately. Nat Eliason wrote about developing slow habits, habits that are slower to form but more durable:
This idea of letting habits slowly emerge over time goes against the common rhetoric that you have to be consistent. You have to do it every day. You can’t break the chain.
But this is perhaps a golden rule with building anything. The faster you build it and more you rush it, the more fragile it is. The slower and more naturally you construct it, the more durable it will be.
Obviously it needs to be moderated. If you're too gentle with yourself then the change might never happen. You could end up being somebody who sits around saying "oh I want to quit drinking" for ten years.
But if you’re patient and keep nudging yourself in the right direction, the change you want might just naturally emerge. And it would be better to develop one habit over the course of a year than to fail to develop twelve.
In his essay, he described his not-drinking habit. I was reminded of how I went from eating fast food multiple times a week in my teens to having no cravings for fast food in my 20s. Getting rid of the unhealthy eating habit took me a decade but will likely endure and benefit me for the rest of my life.
There were a couple of times where I took a very deliberate week off or even a month off, but the periods of not drinking have just naturally been extending longer and longer. Something about continually reminding myself of the desire to stop, and then doing it and feeling good about it, has slowly pushed the habit in that direction without me having to force it.
On the one hand, it might feel like a failure to have wanted to develop this not-drinking-habit four years ago and to still be trying to develop it.
But on the other hand, there is something that feels more durable about letting it emerge slowly over time like this. It gives a certain strength to the habit that I don't think it would have if I tried to force it all the way right away. At this point I feel reasonably confident that based on the current trajectory I’ll be having alcohol fewer than 10-20 days a year within a year or two. I don’t have to force it. The desire just keeps decreasing.
Taking a step back, did I really fail if I didn’t write as much as I had wanted but wrote nevertheless? Like Ryan Holiday wrote, “The path to self-improvement is slippery, and falling is inevitable. You’ll sleep in and not be able to read that page, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll say “yes” and take on too much, or you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of social media. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re only a bad person if you give up.“ The point is I didn’t give up. And I hope you don’t too.
Never succeeding
Besides preparing to fail once in a while, it might also be helpful to bear in mind that we might never succeed, as in reaching a stage where we are perfectly satisfied with our habits or achievements.
When asked about Stripe’s success, Patrick Collison quoted legendary cyclist Greg LeMond, “It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
And I used to kind of cycle quite a bit. And there’s a lot of sort of painful truth to that whereas you cycle more, as you practice more, as you get fitter, as you get faster, as your form gets better, sure, you start cycling faster. Your times get better. But the experience of being on the bike never gets easier. The pain that you feel on the first bike ride, that’s the same pain that you’re going to feel on your 500th bike ride. You’ll just be going much faster on the 500th bike ride. And it kind of feels like that in a startup, where every day now the problems and challenges and, you know, visceral pain is just as acute as when we were starting out. The problem is just in a different form. It’s this kind of relentless process of trying to shift what it is that exists and what we’ve collectively managed to create so far into what we all set out to create in the first place. And we still have quite a ways to go there.
As both a cyclist and a founder, that resonated with me. While Patrick Collison was referring to the entrepreneurship journey, it also applies to many other aspects of our lives, such as habits and creative work. My writing has improved since I started my blog in 2013. I feel embarrassed looking at my first few blog posts. But writing never got easier. Yes, I have learned to come up with ideas with more ease, find information more quickly, and type faster. But writing still feels as hard. I still struggle with finding the most compelling story angle, crafting a coherent flow, and making my essays engaging.
And I always feel my essays can be better. As we get better at creative work, our tastes and expectations grow. Ira Glass, creator and host of This American Life, is often quoted for his thoughts on “the gap”—the gap between our taste and our work:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.
Similarly, Celine Nguyen recently wrote about divine discontent, a concept she picked up from David Ogilvy.
The agency’s success, Ogilvy insisted, came from their commitment to excellence, ambition and humility. “We have a divine discontent,” he once wrote, “with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.”
To me, divine discontent is about cheerfully seeking out dissatisfaction. It’s choosing to ask, What could be better? What can I improve? It’s a feeling that practitioners across many fields—in literature, art, music, performance, film; but also the sciences, engineering, and mathematics—can relate to.
I’d say this can be applied to all aspects of our lives: parenting, exercising, eating, and so on.
Our work might never feel good enough, even as each piece keeps getting better; we might never feel good enough, even as we keep getting better. And that’s okay. That, to me, is the beauty of pursuing a new habit, lifestyle, or virtue. The pursuit—being actively engaged with the process, struggling through the journey, and finally producing an outcome while knowing it or we will be better the next time we try—is the real reward.
Sometimes I question why I keep coming back to writing after hating it in school and failing to maintain a consistent habit for years. And despite all the agony and frustration in writing every piece, I always start another draft. It might be the same as marathon runners who complain about the suffering, swear they will never run a marathon again, and then proceed to sign up for the next one. I might never win the Nobel Prize in Literature, just as a weekend warrior might never win an Olympic gold medal in the marathon. But we just keep writing, running, trying.
Following through
If you now feel motivated to use the new year momentum to achieve something in the new year, great! But let’s make sure we follow through on our commitment.
In 2025, I want to write more (as usual), read more, and eat more healthily, among many other goals. I have been using the last few weeks of December, after I set my goals, as a trial run for the coming year. I tried different things and tweaked them to see how I could achieve my goals more easily. Here are three tactics I have been trying:
Craft my environment: One of my top lessons in 2024 is environment drives defaults. I have been editing my environment so that I will be more likely to stick to my habits. I put books around the house so that I will be reminded and will read more. I deleted social media apps on my phone so that I will not scroll aimlessly whenever I have a spare moment. That gives me pockets of time to write in my Notes app. I have fruits, not brownies, in my fridge so that I will eat healthy snacks.
Reduce decisions: From years of optimizing my life, I also learned to reduce the number of decisions I have to make so that it is easier to maintain habits. I used to wake up at the same time every day, which encouraged me to sleep at the same time every night. This slipped after having a kid but I have been up at 6 a.m. for the past two weeks. I used to have a triathlon coach who would plan all my workouts for me, which made exercising easier. I would simply wake up and do the workout. I paused my triathlon training, so now I plan my workouts every month and rotate through them. I also prepare oats overnight for breakfast so that it will be easier to choose to eat healthily.
Do the important things first: My energy level and willpower deplete gradually throughout the day. If I don’t push myself to work on the important things first, chances are I will not do them or do them well. My current morning routine is to work out, read The Daily Dad, spend some time with my family, and then write. For work, I aim to complete one major task every day. I block off my morning to focus on the task. Sometimes, I might end up completing more than one task if it doesn’t take my entire morning but the goal is simply to finish that one major task.
Even after almost a decade of intentionally setting goals and striving for them, I’m still learning how to do better. If you have any tricks that have worked well for you, please share them with me!