'New Year, New You' Doesn't Work.Here's How You Can Actually Improve Your Life.

Instead of resolving to become a different person in 2025, try setting achievable goals and embracing radical doability.’

- Oliver Burkeman

"NEW YEAR, NEW YOU": The traditional slogan encapsulates both the promise and the hopelessness of our annual attempt at personal transformation.

On the one hand, January 1 feels pregnant with the potential for a fresh start, a reboot, a decisive repudiation of all the botched efforts and missteps of the past. On the other hand, if any of that really worked, there would be far fewer people in the market for a new beginning, year after year.

Many of us are familiar with the experience of making New Year's resolutions to boost our physical fitness, get on top of the to-do list, save money, be less irritable around the kids and so on.

What keeps us from accomplishing those things is rarely a lack of self-discipline, or needing a more efficient system for building healthier habits. More often, it's the very attempt to make sweeping changes-to "become unrecognizable," in the parlance of contemporary self-help-that stands in the way of a different, happier and more meaningful life.

It unfolds like this. You want the benefits you think you'd get from, say, taking up running, so you resolve to become a runner. You buy the shoes, download the relevant app to track your progress and watch some tutorials on YouTube. Maybe you even get as far as your first few runs.

But then something goes wrong. Perhaps the prospect of executing the same wholesome actions, every day for the rest of your life, suddenly strikes you as intolerably monotonous and oppressive. Or perhaps the idea of a daily run feels so time-consuming that you tell yourself it's best to wait a few weeks, until various other commitments are out of the way, so you can give it the attention it deserves.

Or maybe the goal you claim you want to reachfor instance, finally launching your own business-secretly intimidates you, so you turn it into a "long-term project," involving much preparatory research, precisely so as to avoid getting started.