Here are some stories of people and their New Year’s Resolutions: 

Mary

Mary has gained 10 kgs in the last year. Her New Year’s resolution is to lose all those extra kilos within the year.

Joe

Joe has been single for some years now. He is determined to change his situation. He has promised himself that this year he is going to find “the one”.

Becky

Becky is unhappy with her current job as a bar tender. Her New Year’s resolution is to make $3,000 a month through her YouTube channel, so she can quit her current job.

All these are typical new year’s resolutions: people are unsatisfied with the current situation regarding their health and appearance, their romantic and social life, and their career and finances. They want a change. They visualize a very clear goal which would give them real happiness, and everything would be different.

In this post, I argue that this is the wrong way to go about New Year’s Resolutions (or self-improvement in general). Instead, I suggest focusing on your identity and your system(s) and let the outcomes take care of themselves.

Let’s start.

What’s Wrong with Goal-based New Year’s Resolutions

In his amazing book, Atomic Habits, James Clear points out to 4 problems of goals, which can be applied to New Year’s Resolutions. These are:

1.- Successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals

2.- The attainment of a goal is a simple momentary change

3.- Goals limit your happiness

4.- Goals are contrary to long-term progress

Let’s explain each of them in detail.

Successful and Unsuccessful People Share the Same Goals

Humans tend to pay attention to and learn from people who are extraordinarily successful and ignore people who are unsuccessful.

We see that successful people are ambitious and have clearly defined goals. Because of this, we assume that having ambitious and clearly defined goals is the secret of their success. However, we forget that successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals:

• • Every candidate wants the job at a job interview, but the job is only offered to one candidate.
  • John, Peter, and Paul are all trying to convince Susan to go out with them, but Susan only has eyes for Steve.
  • Every sport team wants to win the competition, but there is only one champion.

These examples are zero-sum games: for someone to win, everybody else must lose. Zero-sum games are where the sharing of goals between successful and unsuccessful people is more clearly perceived.

However, many New Year’s resolutions aren’t zero-sum. Instead, resolutions often are goals that people set to themselves in which there is no need to compare their performance with anybody else. However, there are successful and unsuccessful people in this type of resolutions too. For example,

• • Many people decide to quit smoking as a New Year’s resolution but only a few achieve it
  • Gyms experienced an increase in the number of members early in the year but few of them keep going regularly during the entire year.

Because successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, goal-based New Year’s resolutions are not the key to success.

The Attainment of a Goal Is a Simple Momentary Change

Say that you share Mary’s New Year’s resolution: you want to lose 10 kgs of weight. You increase your amount of exercise and restrict your caloric intake. After some months of hard work, you achieve your goal.

What are you going to do now? Are you going to keep a high level of physical activity and watching what you eat? Or you are going to slid back to your old habits?

Independently of what you do, the truth is that achieving your initial goal is just a momentary change. Some people would relax, reduce their level of exercise, and stuff themselves with junk food again. Others would move on to a new goal instead. For example, adding a couple of kgs of muscle to their biceps.

Because the achievement of a goal is just temporary, we shouldn’t focus as much on our goals. Instead, we should focus on the strategies and habits that lead us to good or bad results.

Goals Limit Your Happiness

Do you remember Joe? His New Year’s resolution was to be in a romantic relationship. He dreams about a future in which he will be with someone. If he is in a relationship, he will be happy. This means that all the time he isn’t with someone he will be unhappy.

Equating the achievement of a goal with happiness leads you to a dichotomous trap: either you are a winner or a loser, happy or unhappy, a success or a failure.

To avoid this trap, you should focus on your system. In James Clear’s words:

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.”

This means that you will be happy as long as you are working on improving some key aspect of your life.

In the case of Joe, falling in love with the process would mean that he is happy if he is working on himself to become the type of man that women love to be in relationships with. For example, this could mean to work on his social skills, appearance, or leadership. In this way, Joe would be happy independently of the results with women he gets.

Goals Are Contrary to Long-term Progress

Focusing exclusively on attaining some specific goals such as losing 10 kgs of weight, finding a partner, or making $3,000/month through your online business go against your long-term progress.

Many people who manage to achieve their goal-based New Year’s resolutions destroy their results by stop taking care of the system that led to those achievements. Consequently, they need to work again and again in the same goal.

For example, if Mary manages to lose those annoying 10 kilos, she might stop exercising and start eating more. Consequently, she would gain those extra kilos again. This will lead her to being unhappy about her weight, having to exercise and diet once again.

In contrast, if Mary would have focused on adopting healthy habits with independence of the results, it would be more likely that she keeps a healthy lifestyle when she gets back to her ideal weight. In this way, she would continue progressing, instead of behaving like a yo-yo.

In the same vein, if Joe starts going out with Amanda, a goal-based mentality would lead Joe to stop working on himself. As a result, he might become less attractive for Amanda, leading to lower the quality of their relationship. This could eventually lead to Amanda breaking up with Joe. If this happens, Joe will need to work on himself again if he wants to be back with Amanda or enter a new relationship.

If Joe focuses on his system instead, he will keep working on himself to become more and more attractive overtime independently of his relationship status. This would mean that when he is in a relationship, his partner would likely become more attractive to him over time. When he is single, he will be more in demand among the ladies, which will give him multiple options to enter a relationship if he wants to.

The Identity-based Approach to New Year’s Resolutions

If goal-setting is not the best way to go about New Year’s Resolutions, what should we do instead?

We should develop a system of habits that are congruent with the identity

of the person we want to become.

The rationale is that your identity is tightly connected to what you do. If you go to the gym every day, you are a fitness enthusiast. If you regularly smoke, you identified as a smoker. If you don’t miss a bachata night, you are a bachata dancer.

Once your identity gets involved, you are more likely to keep the actions that are congruent with that identity and avoid actions that are incongruent.

Consequently, the identity-based approach to New Year’s Resolutions based on James Clear’s Atomic Habits entails two steps.

1.- Choosing an identity

2.- Do small actions that prove that identity to yourself

Let’s see each one of them.

First Step: Choosing an Identity

The first step is to decide what type of person you want to become.

For example, Mary could decide to become a healthy living enthusiast. Joe instead would embrace the identity of an attractive man, while Becky would focus on becoming a YouTuber.

Once this decision is taken, it is the time for the second step.

Second Step: Do Small Actions to Prove that Identity to Yourself

The second step is to do small actions that provide you with evidence that you are the type of person you want to become.

Every time Mary eats non-processed food instead of junk food, she provides evidence of being a healthy enthusiast to herself. As she adds more and more evidence of her new identity as a healthy living enthusiast, her identity will get progressively reinforced. Consequently, it would be more difficult for her to abandon the lifestyle of a healthy living enthusiast.

Similarly, every time that Joe leads a social activity, he would be providing evidence of being an attractive man to himself. The more of this type of evidence he provides to himself, the more his identity as an attractive man will strengthen. In this way, it would be more likely that he continues leading social activities or developing other attractive traits.

When Becky uploads a new video to her YouTube channel, she is showing to herself that she is providing useful content to her community. As she creates more and more videos, her identity as a YouTuber would be stronger.

The Consequence of Identity-based New Year’s Resolutions

The most direct consequence of embracing an identity-based approach to New Year’s resolutions is that the outcomes will take care of themselves. You will only focus on adding up evidence to your chosen identity, without caring much about the results you get.

This is a quite stoic approach. One of the tenets of stoicism is to focus on what is under your control and ignore what escape your influence. When you focus on your habits, systems, and identity, you are focusing on things that are entirely under your control.

When you embrace the identity of a fitness enthusiast, you will focus on going to the gym several times a week. This is entirely under your control – if you keep your gym attendance, you will be successful in your New Year’s resolution. Specific results such as losing 10 kg of weight would happen at some point but aren’t your focus.

A second consequence is that you will give you permission to be happy right now.

If your identity-based New Year’s resolution is becoming a YouTuber, you will be happy with yourself as long as you keep uploading videos to your channel. Your happiness will not depend on the number of followers you get or the revenue you generate. In this way, you will enjoy the process rather than the result.

Lastly, the identity-based approach to New Year’s resolutions will mean long-term progress.  Because the focus on identity-based New Years’ resolutions is to develop an identity and a system (or set of actions) to reinforce that identity, it will take you further than the goal-based approach. The goal-based approach ends when you goal is achieved, while the identity-based approach doesn’t have an end: you need to fuel your identity forever.

Consequently, you will achieve more by focusing on becoming the type of person you want to be than by focusing on achieving specific goals.

A Note On Atomic Habits

This post is based on chapters 1 and 2 of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. These chapters focused on comparing systems and goals in general, I have adapted Clear’s message to refer to New Year’s resolutions.

In my opinion, Atomic Habits is one of the best books on personal development ever written. It’s so good that this year I have given it to my mum as a Christmas present 😊

The main message of the book is that by making tiny changes that accumulate over time you will attain remarkable results. To this end, Clear provides sound advice on his book on how to develop good habits by 1) making these good habits obvious, 2) attractive, 3) easy, and 4) satisfying.

This life-changing book is also extremely popular: more than 10 million copies have been sold and it has been translated into more than 50 languages.

If you want to improve your life, I deeply recommend you read and follow the philosophy of Atomic Habits.  

I have previously published another post on The Adventure of Success inspired by James Clear’s Atomic Habits. If you have liked this post, you might want to read it too: The Compound Effect of Learning a New Skill.

Dr Ángel V Jiménez