With it being early January, everybody is (hopefully) still motivated to make some positive improvement in their lives.
This is great!
I’ve been writing about goals, resolutions, change, and “New year, new me” for 17 years now (good lord). There’s a common pitfall I see time and time again from well-intentioned, well-meaning folk who are ultimately doomed.
Let’s give ourselves the best chance possible with a little help from J. R. R. Tolkien.
What’s different this time?
As we’re thinking through January and the rest of 2026, I have one big question:
“What’s different this time?”
Every year, I hear people saying the same thing over and over: “I really should try to eat better this year.” or “I’m gonna try to cut back on carbs” or “I’m gonna try to run a half-marathon again.”
These are goals they’ve had every January for a decade or more, with a plan that boils down to “do the same thing that didn’t work last time…but try harder.”
There are two problems with this:
- Change is hard! Our brains and bodies are lazy. They want the path of least resistance. And that path of least resistance is simply keeping the status quo: doing what we’ve always done. Or, as my friend Ramit Sethi puts it, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
- We are creatures of habit and products of our environment. We’re overwhelmingly influenced by the people around us, our day-to-day life at home and our jobs, and past patterns. Relying on willpower and discipline is like bringing a rubber knife to a bazooka fight.
As the saying goes, if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got.
When we try to make the same change we made last year, but with more effort or willpower, we’ll fall right back to where we started as soon as life happens because willpower and discipline will bail on us at the slightest sign of adversity!
If we want a different result, we need a different plan.
Here’s one way to think about it.
What are you afraid of?
There’s an amazing scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Frodo is sitting with Aragorn at The Prancing Pony. The dangerous Ringwraiths are after the Hobbits, and Aragorn questions Frodo:
Aragorn: “Are you frightened?”
Frodo: “Yes.”
Aragorn: “Not nearly enough, for I know what hunts you.”
We’re not being chased by Ringwraiths (I hope), but our future selves are being hunted by the things that will go wrong in the coming weeks.
And on a long enough timeline, every possibility becomes an inevitability.
A kid will get sick. A work project will suck. Our internal monologue will sabotage us. And when our motivation and willpower and discipline are gone, we will bail on our resolution “for now.” We’ll say “we’ll try again when we’re less busy.” Maybe we just give up altogether until next January.
(There’s a reason they call the second Friday in January: “Quitter’s Day.”)
After training like 15,000 people over at Nerd Fitness, we’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. It’s why we ask every coaching client at the beginning of their journey, “What are you afraid will happen?”
Specifically, we want them to think about past attempts and where things went wrong. Then, we can create pre-emptive plans on how to stop the same problem from derailing this next attempt:
Maybe life got busy and we said “I’ll take a break until things slow down.” Great! We allow ourselves to be okay with partial workouts, going for 5-minute walks, eating one healthy meal, and treading water.
Maybe we had a bad day and let our “all-or-nothing” mentality send us off the rails. Great! We know we struggle with impulse control and use food as a comfort mechanism, we can forgive ourselves for being human, not look back in anger or guilt, and get back on track.
Maybe we gave up when things got hard, even though we know we’re capable of doing hard things? Great! We can consider adding a Ulysses Pact to guard against our weaknesses, or recruit a friend to stay accountable.
If we know the things that got in the way last time, we can create systems and strategies to avoid those particular problems before they cause the next roadblock.
Different results require different strategies
We are scientists, conducting experiments on ourselves to try and make a sustainable change and improve our lives.
Like scientists, we need to pick a new variable to test and see if this is the one that works for us.
- Pick ONE experiment (not 10).
- Try a different type of exercise.
- Try a different diet or nutrition change.
- Recruit a friend to join you so you’re not doing it alone.
- Make your new desired behavior beneficial or necessary.
Here’s the important part: even if this next experiment doesn’t result in the change we hoped for, it’s not a reflection on who we are as people. It’s something that happened. A data point. A new lesson we can learn from.
We try something new, we get better at it. It works until it doesn’t.
Then we pick a new experiment to test, and repeat the process.
-Steve
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