Why New Year’s Resolutions Are Terrible And What To Do Instead

We’ve all been there.

You overindulge across the holiday season. Too much chocolate. Too much beer, wine, and too many festive tipples. Too much cheese. Just, well, too much.

Then the shame, the guilt, the self-flagellation set it. “That’s the last time,” you tell yourself…for the tenth time.

The New Year will see a new you. You’ll quit booze. You’ll cycle to the office every day. You’ll make a symbolic gesture for throwing all the sugar and processed food in the kitchen in the bin.

Fast forward a month — two at the outside — and you’re cracking open a bottle of red on a random Tuesday as you’ve had a hard day. You’ve ordered a deeply unhealthy takeaway. And your bike has accumulated its own collection of spider webs and dust bunnies.

So don’t bother with the grandiose and utterly futile gesture of pretending you are going to transform overnight into a fundamentally different person. You’re not kidding anyone except yourself. And I should know. Been there. Done that. Didn’t even get a T-shirt.

January 1st in my house saw the annual crushing sense of self-recrimination after a period of gluttony, drunkenness, and general excess. And I would be right there pouring booze down the sink; binning cheese, chocolate, and anything that smacked of pleasure or processing.

But a few years ago I moved from London to Basel in Switzerland — late 2019 to be precise (just in time for a global pandemic). Talking to friends here managed to undo the social conditioning that seems to afflict the English-speaking world more than some other (potentially far more sensible) societies.

And when it came to setting the annual utterly unrealistic resolutions and sacrifices I was met with complete bafflement amongst the Baselers and the other immigrants who called this small city on the banks of the River Rhine home.

“why are you stopping drinking now?”

“why would you move to a place that makes some of the best chocolate in the world and not eat it?”

“So you want to stop eating cheese? You can’t be pregnant so are you dying?”

And so on and so on. When I explained the idea of resolutions they were summarily dismissed as an absurd notion that was merely an excuse for not doing what they and their parents have been doing in that quiet, unassuming Swiss way for decades — namely setting goals.

And this isn’t simply the classical “I want to get fit / lose weight / master a skill” type singular goal.

My interpretation of the different approaches I’ve learned about over the last couple of years is as follows:

At any moment in your life, it is healthy and provides focus and motivation to maintain goals for life and work against multiple timelines. And the shorter the timeline — I would recommend 6 months as the minimum, with 10 years being the ultimate horizon — the more granular and more focused you can be on it.

Some of my goals for the next decade are:

• Gain conversational proficiency in German — Year 1
• Gain professional proficiency in French — Year 1–2
• Achieve Yachtmaster certification — Year 2
• Build 2 income streams outside of my 9–5 job that brings in six figures — Year 1–4
• Write and publish a book — non-fiction, sharing some of my professional experience helping companies respond to and recover from crises — Year 3
• Buy an apartment in the Valais region of the Swiss Alps — Year 5
• Secure optionality and security through financial independence for my family — Year 10

And there are more at various stages along that ten-year timeline. The point I hope to make it is that those are all — for me at least— aspirational, motivating, and inspiring. I’m not giving anything up, sacrificing anything, or left with a feeling that I’m losing something through having these goals. Quite the contrary — they give me focus and an excuse for action.

And the nearer the goal — years 1–2 — the more attention and emphasis I place on them. We are still talking about a reasonable amount of time so there is a healthy amount of pressure rather than an unhealthy, and unhelpful, amount of stress by thinking in those terms and timelines.

Now, will these goals shift over the course of the next 12 months? Of course, they will. Are they the same set as when I first started this exercise three years ago? Of course, they aren’t.

But they are true evolutions of those that I started with. Getting more comfortable speaking German and French has flipped as an example — I rather ambitiously wanted to get professional-level German from a standing start within two years. Turns out my brain has other ideas and so I recalibrated to bring my German up to a standard that passes muster, while I also build on the solid foundation I already have with my French.

So, if you’re asked what resolutions you’ve made/are going to make as we step into the year 2024 I can wholeheartedly recommend saying absolutely none.

Set some goals instead.

And don’t be afraid to think big either.

That big idea might be all the encouragement you need to get up early/pitch the idea/make the choice.