Why I Stopped Making New Year's Resolutions
Every January, millions of people commit to changing their lives. Most fail within weeks. After years of being one of them, I've stopped playing this game entirely.
It's that time of year again. Social media fills with declarations of transformation. Gym memberships spike. Journals get bought. Everyone seems convinced that this year will be different.
I used to be right there with them. Every January, I'd sit down with a Notion template and write out my resolutions. Lose weight. Read more. Be more productive. Learn a new skill. The list was always ambitious, always hopeful. And by February, often abandoned—or reduced to a fraction of what it had been.
This year, I'm not making any resolutions. Not because I've given up on growth—quite the opposite. I've just realized that the entire framework is designed to fail.
The Numbers Don't Lie
The research on New Year's resolutions is bleak. Studies suggest that somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of resolutions fail, most within the first few weeks. A study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology found that only about 12 percent of people who make resolutions feel they achieved what they set out to do.
Why? Part of it is timing. January 1st is an arbitrary date, not a moment of genuine readiness. We set resolutions because the calendar tells us to, not because we've done the internal work to be ready for change. The motivation comes from external pressure—everyone else is doing it—rather than intrinsic drive.
There's also the issue of scope. Resolutions tend to be vague and enormous. "Get healthy." "Be more present." "Find a better job." These aren't actionable plans; they're wishes. And wishes, it turns out, don't survive contact with reality.
The Problem With Once-a-Year Thinking
Beyond the statistics, there's something fundamentally off about the resolution model. It assumes that meaningful change happens in one dramatic moment—that we can decide on December 31st to become a different person and wake up on January 1st ready to execute.
But that's not how change works. Real growth is gradual, iterative, and rarely linear. It doesn't care about the calendar. Waiting until New Year to address something that matters to you is just procrastination dressed up as intention.
I've written before about why I stopped setting annual goals altogether. The same logic applies to resolutions. When you tie your sense of progress to a single yearly checkpoint, you spend most of your time either anticipating change or recovering from failed attempts at it. Neither state is particularly useful.
What I Do Instead
I've moved toward something smaller and more continuous. Instead of grand annual declarations, I run little tests throughout the year. Try something for a week or two. See if it sticks. If it does, keep going. If it doesn't, learn from it and try something else.
This approach feels less dramatic, which is probably why it works better. There's no pressure to transform everything at once. There's no public declaration that raises the stakes. There's just quiet experimentation, repeated regularly, with permission to fail and adjust.
The best changes I've made in recent years didn't start on January 1st. They started on random Tuesdays when I noticed something wasn't working and decided to try a different approach. No fanfare. No resolution. Just a small shift, tested against reality.
Still Here, Still Growing
This isn't a post against self-improvement. I care deeply about getting better at what I do, about learning, about becoming a more effective person. If anything, abandoning resolutions has helped me take growth more seriously by removing the theatrical elements that made it feel performative.
The resolution ritual, for me, had become a way of feeling productive without actually doing anything. Writing down ambitious goals gave me a temporary sense of control. But the goals themselves rarely survived past the first obstacle.
I'd rather skip the ritual and focus on the work. Small experiments, honest feedback, gradual adjustments. It's less exciting than a New Year transformation story, but it actually moves the needle.
So if you're reading this in January and feeling the pressure to declare your intentions for the year—or if you've already done so: if you're still on track, genuinely—keep going, that's amazing! If not, maybe it's worth asking whether resolutions are really the right approach for you. Maybe this year, instead of a resolution, you just start. No announcement. No timeline. Just one small thing, tested against your life, to see if it fits.
That's what I'll be doing. Still here. Still figuring it out. One small experiment at a time.