New Year's Resolutions, Systems, and Themes

Hey all,

Welcome to the New Year (7 or 8 days late), but it is the new year nonetheless! In light of this, you already know I have to do what all the best bloggers do and talk about how to set the right goals and change yourself for the better during 2024.

Now, a quick disclaimer - I stopped believing in "New Year's Resolutions" a while ago. This is for a couple of reasons:

It seems a bit irrational to me to only set resolutions to change yourself at the start of the year.
More importantly, sometimes I feel like New Year's Resolutions are counterproductive. For one, breaking them is pretty demoralizing, and they seem to train people to only reevaluate themselves and their goals at a certain point in time rather than continually doing so throughout their lives.

Still, that's not to say that having resolutions is bad. Setting goals for the New Year is still better than nothing, and it's good that society has an event to help people set new goals and think about the future.

But, if you decide to participate in making a New Year's Resolution, I urge you to make your resolutions a little looser or change how you measure the "success" of these resolutions.

This great video by CGP Grey explains one alternative I like: yearly themes.

I suggest you watch it before reading if you want his full thoughts (it's only a 6-minute video), but here's a quick rundown:

Instead of setting measurable yearly goals, he suggests setting a year-long theme that you keep in mind the whole year. So, instead of having a demoralizing, stressful goal to shoot for, you have a little theme in the back of your mind that will help you make better choices.
- The big idea is that self-improvement doesn't have to be measured. All you have to do is make the right choice slightly more often than you used to.
- For instance, if your yearly theme is exercise, you'd keep this theme in mind throughout the year, and even if it only motivated you to take an extra walk once per month, that's a success.

Now, I like this idea, and I even participated in it for multiple years (my yearly theme this year was self-actualization and eating healthier). However, I also think this idea of yearly themes needs a little more structure before it can be as effective as possible.

So, I've decided on a new idea: building yearly systems or habits. This isn't super different from having a theme, but I think this idea of systems/habits significantly differs from yearly themes in a couple of ways:

Firstly, a yearly system or habit is focused more on longevity and tiny improvements.
- The idea is that we're trying to get our better decisions to "stick around" by using habits or different systems to make self-improvement easier.
  - For example, instead of having a theme of reading, I want to build a habit of reading when I'm bored this year so that even when the year has passed (and when my theme is over), I still feel the urge to read when I walk home or stand in line at the store.
- To me, this helps cement a new lifestyle choice better than the idea of a yearly theme does.
  - (Like, I think the idea of a theme is that those habits will stay over time, but building in this idea of longevity is still helpful to me.)
Secondly, this idea of habits will help us think about the systems around us more often.
- This is useful because it helps add some accountability back into a New Year's goal without being demoralizing or negative. You can always check in on how often you're completing the habits you'd like to, unlike themes where it can be hard to determine at what rate you're making better choices.
  - (I would suggest checking in on your habits every three months - making a list helps too).
- Plus, thinking in systems as they relate to habits means you're always looking at ways to improve your surroundings rather than beating yourself up because you didn't have the willpower to get up for the gym at 6 am. \
  - In fact, thinking in systems is one of my major revelations from this past year. It's nice because when you start to look at how the things around you change your life, you realize that many of your unproductive choices stem from how you've set up your environment, not any lack of willpower or fault of your own.

In this way, setting yearly habits helps you create longer-lasting, more measurable goals (unlike a yearly theme) while focusing more on making good habits easy rather than testing how long your willpower can last throughout the year (like in a more punishing regular resolution). Therefore, yearly habits are most of my resolutions for this year. If you want, I urge you to try them out with me!

But if not, that's all I've got for today. I hope you learned something, changed your resolutions, or at least enjoyed reading this post. If you did, let me know!

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

-Ethan