How People Who Kept Their New Year’s Resolutions Did It
Advice from people who achieved some pretty remarkable goals
Time is kinda fake, but the new year nevertheless feels like a clean slate, a moment where you have the opportunity to shed old sins and reinvent yourself anew. For many, this translates to buying a gym membership and vowing to lose 15 pounds. So by March, when you still haven’t set foot in your local Planet Fitness, you wonder where it all went wrong, and tell yourself that you’ll try again next year. Still, there are plenty of people who are able to achieve their resolutions, and they have a variety of useful suggestions that can help you do the same.
Before I get into these success stories, I want to emphasize that not being able to keep your New Year’s resolutions isn’t a reflection of your fundamental flaws or anything — it’s legitimately hard to do. My graveyard of failed resolutions include: from 2016, “get published in print” (I have achieved this many times over now, but I didn’t back then, and it was probably a bad idea to set a goal that relies on factors beyond my control), from 2017, “write a book” (I’d still love to but I have no idea what I want it to be about), and from 2021, “do a pull-up” (this was a way of getting myself to work out more, which I did, but realized in June that instead of going to the gym…
