How to build a New Year Resolution that survives

I used to work in a personal development company as a Product Manager. Every January, our engagement activity boosts by 300%+. Everybody’s motivated, watching educational lessons and practising meditations, and I could see numbers drop after the first 3 weeks. I observed this same pattern for the 3 years I worked there. This is the classic example of gym memberships, too.

Why do 99% New Year's resolutions fail? I am sure you all set your New Year's resolution this January, as well as last year. The chances are, a few weeks later, you couldn’t even find where you wrote them.

It’s not that most of us are not motivated. We truly are. We just give up halfway through. Where we fail is with consistency.

1. Don’t wait for motivation

Most people misunderstand motivation.

You will not be motivated to go for a morning run immediately after waking up.

It’s the laziest thing to do. I just woke up! My brain is still half asleep. I cannot find my workout clothes. Where are my shoes? There’s a list of things I need to do to prepare for a run. And then imagine the sweat, heavy breathing, it’s so sunny outside.

You create a list of reasons to justify not running. Your brain is very good at presenting arguments to make your life easier. So if you imagine you will still have the motivation to run in the morning, as much as you had when you were writing your New Year's resolution, that is just a fairytale.

It’s not your fault. We are wired this way. Our brains try their best to conserve energy. When you try to install a new behaviour, you trigger a higher cognitive load; there are new behaviour patterns to learn. Your brain, detecting this new energy expense, generates a friction to proceed. You aren’t really fighting laziness, you’re fighting behaviour change.

This is why it’s important to show up. Fighting yourself on the plethora of excuses, the cold, the fatigue, if you still show up, that’s the first sign of progress.

When you force yourself to move, you fight your brain’s friction of conserving energy, kick off your blood circulation, increase oxygenation of blood, and flush your brain with dopamine and norepinephrine. You start breathing in sync with your movements. You successfully overcome the inertia that held you back, and your brain switches to a performance gear to help you keep up with the momentum.

So we don’t really need motivation to get us started; we find it ourselves by pushing it through.

This is a lesson learned the hard way.

2. Illusion of goal setting

“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems” - James Clear

Goal setting is deceptively easy. Writing a list of goals gives a false sense of achievement, a premature dopamine hike without having the cost of labour in doing the actual work. Anyone can visualise themselves in a great physique, but very few would do a consistent workout routine.

Goals are merely an imaginary state, a destination far from reality. It is necessary to set goals, but not sufficient. When reality hits, when the January motivation fades away, the goals simply become a list of words that have no meaning.

To reach the destination we desire, we need to set the trajectory and build the vehicle to take us there. That is the system we build around us. A system is not just a list of habits we build; it is an environment we build around ourselves that complements the good habits we want to adopt, engineered for inevitability.

A system that complements the list of goals we set to achieve. This includes our morning workflow, our sleep hygiene, and the data that gives us feedback on our progress.

Great personal systems are not built overnight. It takes time to understand what habits would help us be better. It takes time to engineer the surroundings to complement such habits.

Example

Goal: Read more books

System: Placing a book on the shelf next to your bed, so you read one chapter before sleep every day.

Start simple, show up first, and slowly, iteratively make progress, and in time, we will get the hang of it

3. Automation is essential

As we discussed earlier, the brain is a ruthlessly efficient machine which consumes roughly 20% of the body’s metabolic energy while representing only 2% of its mass. Therefore, our brain’s primary functionality is also to conserve energy at all costs.

Every decision we make has a cognitive cost to it. We tax our prefrontal cortex every time we struggle in a decision on meditating for 2 minutes or going for a morning walk. Our busy schedules do not allow this additional cognitive cost, which will eventually deplete our capacity by the mid-day.

Setting up a routine is a survival mechanism. Routines allow our brain to offload cognitive cost in repetitive tasks, from the pre-frontal cortex to the basal ganglia, which is the primary hardware responsible for pattern recognition in our brain.

When our behaviours stop being important decisions and become automations, we are more likely to stick to these behaviours, rather than relying on finding motivation to keep up.

4. Setting up the social contract

Setting up promises and rules to ourselves has a fundamental, structural error. The enforcer of the rule and the defendant have a conflict of interest.

This is why we hit the snooze button. The rule is to wake up at 5AM. When the alarm goes off, the brain negotiates a deal with itself to make amendments, to allow 10 more minutes of sleep by hitting snooze.

There is no social cost to this behaviour.

In the hierarchy of human needs, social reputation is a survival currency. We are wired to protect our social standing beyond our personal comfort. While we would easily negotiate a contract made with ourselves, we will endure greater discomfort in preserving contracts we made with our peers, in the risk of appearing unreliable.

Define the output: "I will send you a photo of my running shoes by 6:15 AM.”

Define the stakes: "If I miss a day, I will buy your coffee for a week”

Simply attaching the social and financial cost to the habit you desire to adopt, we make it more painful to avoid the action.

Habits, despite of good or bad, results are most likely delayed. If you do not workout regularly, the cholesterol levels will go up when you check in 3 months. By setting up a social contract that affect you socially and financially rather instantly, we engineer our behavior to meet the expectation.

Failure of design

We now know the reason for the vanishing of 99% new year resolutions is not a failure of character, but design. Motivation is a tough variable to deal with. Relying on willpower will not be enough.

Those who push through when odds are not in their favour, for those who engineer their life around behaviour that complements their goals, automate their environment, and leverage social contracts, will find it easier to join the 1% of New Year's resolutions that last.

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