The Fallacy of 'New Year, New Me'

“New Year, New Me”. Who has never heard or said that? The “year” is a symbolic mark in the calendar that marks a fresh start and renewal. However, it is horse crap to believe that you will suddenly change into a new person as the new year begins. This is why resolutions fail; you ask yourself to become another person in a single day and rely only on willpower to brute-force your way through change.

Perhaps you are also more careful. You enjoy winter breaks to carefully plan your goals and desired achievements for the year. You’re one step ahead of most people! Failing to plan is planning to fail, as they say. But this approach has one caveat: simply planning and thinking about doing an activity gives the illusion of productivity. You are not actually succeeding in your goal, but rather you are envisioning yourself succeeding. Therefore, you live your success before you achieve it. There is still value in doing this because it gives you the initial motivation to start doing things.

The problem with motivation is that its effect is limited in time, and you only have so much mental juice to entertain it. When you feel your motivation leaving you, what if you remind yourself of your Big Goal, feeling it, living it as if it were real? I suspect that even reminding yourself periodically of your goal by envisioning yourself succeeding is inefficient. In his book “The Talent Code”, Daniel Coyle spits out many studies about skills, motivation, and talent. An interesting result that he presents is that athletes and skill practitioners’ motivation decreases as the praise from their coaches increases. In other words, people want to succeed more if they have less flattering comments about their performance and talent.

This makes sense because the more praise one is given, the fewer incentives there are to improve and become better. If anything, harshness and struggle are better to create the right conditions for change because they force us to become better to succeed. So, repeatedly viewing yourself succeeding at your goal is like repeatedly praising yourself. Thus, motivation will eventually fade away. After a few days, weeks, or months, you will have to rely on something else to push yourself to achieve your goal. And even if your goal is something you think you really want, the daily actions that will lead you there can be quite painful.

Let’s say your resolution is to get into shape.. How can you change your approach? Instead of focusing on motivation or willpower, focus on the structure in your life to help you achieve your goal.

Your structure is everything in your environment. It’s what’s in your pantry, the books in your library, your desktop setup, what’s on your laptop, where and when you study or work, etc. These elements have a TREMENDOUS impact on your life. I will give you a few examples of things that influence me:

• If the coffee machine stays on in the morning, I’m much more likely to drink a second cup.
• If my phone is near me when I study, I’m much more likely to browse Instagram when I’m waiting for something to load or before a lecture.
• If there is fruit salad in the refrigerator, I am more likely to eat it instead of unhealthy foods.
• If I prepare some basic ingredients in advance to make healthy lunches, I am much more likely to eat that instead of PB&J sandwiches.

All this is to show that structure is more important than willpower or motivation. If you alter your structure, it will make things easier because you won’t have to think about doing things. Your environment will take care of it. A good example of this is how I changed my approach to practice writing in Italian. I have been learning Italian words for a while now, and I wanted to get a better grasp of the different verb tenses. However, in the morning, I often did not feel like writing a verb in all tenses before studying for school. What I did is that I changed my habit tracker to make it super easy and remove as much friction as possible from the process of writing a verb. First, I made a document on my tablet in the “favorites” section in my note-taking app. Second, I created a huge database of over 100 verbs I could learn and practice. Third, I decided to start writing only simple tenses (present, imperfect, remote past, simple future) to not feel overwhelmed. Finally, I used some habits I was already doing to implement the habit of writing a verb. Each night, I review my day and prioritize my tasks for the next day. I added a step to this pre-existing habit, which is to pick the verb I will be studying the next morning. Then, when the morning comes, I have another habit which is to simply check boxes for the habits I already did that morning. At this point, the verb I picked the day before simply appears on the screen, and all I have to do is to google it, write it, and check it off my list when I’m done.

Why does this work? Because it removes as many decisions and steps as possible when the time to execute the habit comes. When the morning comes and I sit at my computer, I don’t have to choose a verb and make sure I did not already write it in the past. My writing file is easy to access, and I know that since I’m only writing 4 tenses at the time, it won’t take more than 5 minutes. The only thing that I feel could improve is having a link associated with each verb in a database, but that would require extensive work in one go. Who knows? I might implement it someday.

Eventually, working on your goal will become even easier, and you will find yourself wanting to do more. I will write a whole other article about the development of skills and how it works in the brain. For now, just focus on the structure of things in your life.

So, let me propose some changes to your New Year planning (and if you’re reading this after January 1st, it’s not too late! Like I said, the New Year is just a convenient time to reflect because it’s during winter break and it symbolizes a new start, but January 1st is no different than any other day). Set some goals as big as you want, just like you used to do. But instead of visualizing success, visualize the process. What will the daily life of someone trying to achieve this goal be? The purpose of this is twofold. First, it will teach you what you need to do to achieve the goal (this might not be obvious from the get go). Second, it will tell you if you can realistically achieve that goal. If what you want to achieve requires time or resources that you don’t have, you will have to make time or scale down to implement the routines required to succeed.

Let me tell you something that happened to me in 2020. For some time, I also wanted to learn Russian. I think it is super badass, and I have some Russian friends I’d like to speak with in Russian. My goal was to be really solid in Russian and have a conversation by the end of the year.

This goal is realistic. When I went to Italy, I studied Italian for just a bit more than a year, and I was able to have conversations with natives. However, I was learning 10-15 words everyday, and implemented a spaced repetition system in an app. I ended up practicing about 20 minutes each day. However, Russian is much trickier than Italian for me. I’m a native French speaker, so it was relatively easy to learn Italian because the alphabet is almost the same, and there is a significant overlap in the root of many words. In comparison, Russian sounds like gibberish to me, and the only characters from the alphabet I recognize are from my math classes. So, to achieve the same vocabulary progression, I would have to dedicate much more time to Russian. Since I am already learning Italian, reading, writing, programming, and going to school, it would be too ambitious to practice Russian 30 minutes per day for a year starting January 1st. So, I scaled down. Now, my objective is simply to become better and to know more words. I practice 5-10 minutes per day during my lunch break, and I enjoy it! There’s no pressure, and I still get better. Maybe it will take two years before I am comfortable speaking, but the time will come.

To change your mindset from “New Year New Me” to something more actionable, I encourage you to implement daily tracking in your life. Try to track your habits (there are gazillions of softwares and apps for that; I’ll eventually make a post about using Notion for this) [INSERT LINK TO NOTION]. By doing so, you change the focus from 'This is the month/year I change/become...' to 'Today is the day I do...'. By doing this every day, there will eventually be a month or a year that you change/become what you want.

Until next time,
LP