Collections on New Year's resolutions (2025)
Ditch the doomed resolutions — embrace mini-adventures, real connections, and a deep reset to make this year genuinely count.
It's the season for New Year’s resolutions, so I collected some of my favorite ideas I like to remind myself during the new year.
In general, I don't like New Year’s resolutions (see below on "Why wait?"), and because they tend to be grand gesture overreach resolutions that fail around mid-February. I prefer more systematic approaches that stick for the long-term.
New Year’s reservations
Tim Ferriss talks about how he prioritizes New Year’s reservations over New Year’s resolutions: schedule the events with the people that you want to spend more time with well ahead of time — otherwise it won't happen.
It's very true, and it's something I learned before:
if you want more time with your friends, schedule a recurring dinner in your calendar
if you want to exercise more, clear our your mornings during the week and schedule your workouts (perhaps with a personal trainer?)
if you want to read more books, set aside a dedicated hour each evening by scheduling it in your calendar as "reading time"
Mini-adventures
Have you ever taken a weeklong trip to a distant country, where you packed so many adventures and sights into each day that it felt like a lifetime?
This is the underlying logic of mini-adventures: why not intersperse a few more of those types of days within our lives more regularly?
The math of mini-adventures is also very compelling:
"If I can't take one day every eight weeks to do something, my work life is out of balance. But if I do that, I'll have six little mini adventures a year ... Well, if you're 35 ... you live to be, let's say you live to be 85. That's 50 years. If you do those two things I just said, you'll have 50 year-defining things and 300 mini-adventures. That's an insane life. That's an insane life." (Link)
Mini adventures can be as simple as:
visit some old friends in another city
go on a food tour in your own city
go on an outdoor adventure
take a day trip to a nearby town and pretend you're a tourist
just do something different!
Why wait?
In undergrad, when I was asked if I had set any New Years Resolutions, I used to have a particular response: "If I'm going to make a change, why wait until the new year to do so?"
Besides being a little glib and holier-than-thou, it's a reasonable idea. Why would you wait until some arbitrary time date to make a change, if the change is good for you?
As many people have pointed out there's a common human archetype that acute stress leading to meaningful transformation. So, when something disrupts your normal routines, it clears room for you to hear the internal dialogue about things that matter to you.
There is something magical about the switch of the calendar. Sure, it's not optimal to wait, so anything that gets you on your feet to go forward, I'm a fan of it.
Do something big
"Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life." — Sam Altman
James Clear highlights that stifling boredom is the most important aspect of achieving success:
"The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working."
One way to do this is move towards your fear and the Resistance, since it provides something that is exciting but also scary.
In this regard though, Resistance can actually be incredibly useful as a guiding compass. Resistance always orients us opposite the direction of growth and progress, so it has incredible utility as a counter-signaling measure. Self-doubt and fear are two of the most prevalent manifestations of Resistance — therefore, the more fear we feel, the more important the work is to us.
We feel this fear because we are risking a core part of our identity. In contrast to the superficial dabbling of the dilettante, we risk our fundamental identity when we choose a path to advance on.
Notes on a deep reset
There are also more systematic ways to approach your new years. Cal Newport has some awesome notes on “a deep reset” — a more systematic and realistic way to approach new years resolutions.
Silence for solitude: create silence to allow solitude and create enough space to think about what matters to you:
consolidate the sources of news you consume, and drastically cut out the noise
find at least one activity that provides value to other people; this allows you to remind yourself that you can provide value elsewhere
find at least one activity that aims only at improving and empowering yourself
Resonance sampling: identifying aspects that resonate with your ideas of a deep life (look at real-life, documentaries, books)
identify the major areas of your life that matter
craft: what you produce (professionally, non-professionally) that provides value
community: relationships with people and groups
constitution: health
contemplation: drive to have philosophical/ethical engagement with the world
sample examples of people who do things that resonate with you in each of these categories
Heaven and hell exercise: often, jumping into concrete goals is a risky strategy — it’s hard to find a good goal that is both achievable and inspiring — so the heaven and hell exercise can be useful.
hell part: write down a description of your life right now of things that aren't working, then imagine that you kept doing those things, and project that into the future
heaven: write down a description of your life as it could be, if you actually acted upon all these resonating areas
first person narrative: "this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm feeling"
from this foundation, you can launch many different goals and strategies, and it's fine to have false starts
the heaven imagery is going to help give you staying power because you're working for yourself towards something that truly resonates
you should review this document every single quarter/month; and feel free to edit and update it
for each month or quarter, explicitly detail out what you're working on this quarter that will move you from hell to heaven
Concrete action: this is the concrete action on getting away from the hell image and towards heaven.
trying to do too much all at once will short circuit any progress
better to be sequential than parallel
one major change in each of the buckets of your life at most
when identifying a milestone, it should have a concrete measurement of completion
try to identify a physical component of the objective to do first, which then springboards into the behavioral component
e.g. work towards building a deep work shed, thus giving you momentum for the goal of "90 minutes of deep work first thing in the morning"
Deep resets for career changes: if you feel you need to change your career.
from So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport: people overestimate the impact of the content of their work on their happiness (my notes on the book here)
career capital theory: relationship between work and satisfaction is more "transactional": as you build up rare and valuable skills (career capital), you can use those skills as leverage to move towards things in your career that resonate more
without the leverage of career capital, it's difficult to have the ability to move towards things that you resonate with you
therefore, the focus should be on building rare and valuable skills, rather than following your passion
when you're pivoting careers, try to shift to something that preserves the career capital that you've already built, as this will make the path shorter and easier
If you want to read further (you should), I compiled notes for Cal’s book here:
So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport
So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport, makes the argument that the oft-received "follow your passion" advice for finding a career is flawed. Instead, you should approach your career as a quest to develop career capital — rare and valuable skills — which will allow you to develop mastery, autonomy, and connection to your work.