Why New Year's Resolutions Collapse by February
And the quiet mistake almost everyone makes
Table of Contents
Executive Coaching – Why Conferences Fail After the Handshake
Upcoming Events - Meet our Podcast Guest Alasdair Milton, KPMG at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
Reading List for Entrepreneurs and Investors from Series A to IPO and beyond
Podcast Media Data - A Global Top 10% Show - #1 Deep Tech Show in 2025
Why New Year’s Resolutions Collapse by February
December 31. Remember?
The apartment was warm, loud, and crowded. Empty glasses lined the kitchen counter. Someone had opened a window despite the cold, letting in a sharp draft that mixed with laughter and the smell of fireworks still hanging in the air.
“So,” I asked her over the noise, “what’s your New Year’s resolution?”
She didn’t hesitate.
“The gym,” she said, already reaching for her phone. “January 1. Every single day. Seven p.m.”
She swiped, turned the screen toward me, and smiled. A fitness influencer stared back at us, perfectly lit, perfectly sculpted.
“That’s me next year,” she said. “Same time. You’ll see.”
A few days later, the city had fallen back into its usual rhythm. Decorations were coming down. The streets felt faster now, more urgent. A few snowflakes drifted through the air, breath turning visible in the cold. People moved quickly from A to B, busy, purposeful, and somehow heading nowhere.
January had settled in.
I met her in the office.
“How’s the gym going?” I asked.
She paused.
“The gym?”
She frowned, as if searching for context. “Why?”
It was January 4.
The goal itself hadn’t been unclear. She knew exactly what she wanted. She had seen it, imagined it, even scheduled it.
And yet, in less than a week, it had already dissolved. Not with resistance or failure, but with something quieter.
Forgetting.
What’s Really Going On
What happened here isn’t unusual.
By the first week of January, gyms are full again.
By February, many of them are quiet.
The cycle repeats itself with remarkable consistency. New calendars. New notebooks. New intentions. And then, quietly, the return of familiar routines.
Exact numbers vary by study, but the direction is clear. The vast majority of New Year’s resolutions are abandoned before winter is over. Not because people lack discipline. Not because they lack intelligence. But because they misunderstand how change actually works.
Most people treat goals as destinations. In reality, they function more like identities under construction.
The turn of the year creates a psychological pause. It feels like a reset button. But nothing else resets with it. The same environment remains. The same routines. The same pressures. The same internal drift.
If the coming year is going to feel different, that drift has to change.
The Illusion of More
Most resolutions don’t collapse because they are unrealistic.
They collapse because there are too many of them.
Run more. Eat better. Sleep earlier. Build a business. Learn a language. Travel more. Post daily. Invest better. Be present. Be disciplined. Be calm.
Each intention makes sense on its own. Together, they cancel each other out.
The human mind doesn’t respond well to dozens of simultaneous priorities. It responds to clarity. Progress accelerates when attention narrows.
Pete Davis captured this dynamic in his 2018 Harvard commencement speech. He described what he called infinite browsing: the moment when someone opens Netflix to watch a movie, only to spend thirty minutes scrolling — unable to commit, overwhelmed by choice.
The problem isn’t lack of options. It’s the inability to choose when everything remains possible.
That’s why the first step toward real change isn’t optimization.
It’s selection.
Step 1: Commit to One Goal
One goal. Only one.
Not the most impressive one. The one that actually matters. The one that, if it moved, would make everything else easier to carry.
When people narrow their focus to a single objective, something predictable happens. Noise drops. Decisions simplify. Energy stops leaking in all directions at once.
The shift is subtle but measurable. Attention consolidates. Trade-offs become clearer. Progress stops competing with itself.
Write that goal down. Not digitally. On paper. The physical act forces commitment in a way a note on a screen rarely does.
This is the part people usually enjoy. They allow themselves to think bigger than usual. Revenue targets stretch. Career horizons expand. Visions become slightly uncomfortable.
That discomfort matters.
Ambitious goals work not because they are realistic, but because they generate emotion. They create tension between where someone is and who they imagine becoming. That tension, sustained over time, is what pulls behavior forward.
This is a pattern visible in many large-scale ventures. Early supporters of Tesla were not buying a car in 2010. They were buying into a story about energy, technology, and the future. Elon Musk has repeatedly framed his companies around expansive visions, whether through Tesla or SpaceX, whose stated ambition has always extended beyond near-term commercial logic.
The details change. The pattern doesn’t.
People move toward what they can emotionally inhabit.
The question, then, isn’t whether a goal sounds reasonable. It’s whether it creates enough pull to survive contact with daily life.
What’s yours?
Step 2: Keep the Goal Mentally Present
Choosing a goal is not enough.
Many goals don’t fail because they are too hard. They fail because they quietly disappear.
The human mind does not hold abstractions well. What isn’t revisited fades. What isn’t rehearsed loses urgency. A goal that lives only as a sentence written once is quickly overtaken by emails, meetings, errands, and noise.
This is why people who achieve long-term goals tend to stay in regular contact with them. Not obsessively. Briefly, but consistently. Five minutes a day. Sometimes less.
They write the goal down again. They describe it in detail. They imagine concrete situations that would exist if it were already real. Not as fantasy, but as rehearsal.
Elite performers do this instinctively. Formula 1 drivers, for example, often mentally rehearse a circuit before a race. Eyes closed, hands moving, turns anticipated. The goal is not motivation. It is familiarity. By the time the car moves, the track already feels known.
Goals work the same way. The more familiar a future state becomes, the less foreign the actions required to reach it feel.
This isn’t about positive thinking. It’s about reducing cognitive distance.
When a goal stays present in the mind, behavior begins to organize around it — often quietly, without effort or force.
Forgetting becomes less likely. Continuity becomes possible.
Step 3: Shift Attention From Outcomes to Process
Outcome-based goals have a habit of turning against the people who set them.
Measurable targets are useful. They provide direction. But when progress lags behind expectation, they also create pressure — and pressure often leads to abandonment.
Take a runner aiming to finish a marathon under three hours. With two months to go, the goal feels motivating. With one month left and pace still lagging, it starts to feel accusatory. Frustration sets in. Training becomes inconsistent. Eventually, the goal that was meant to inspire becomes the reason to stop.
Business unfolds in a similar way. A startup sets an ambitious revenue target for the end of the year. By December, the gap feels too wide. Meetings grow tense. Focus shifts from execution to explanation. Sometimes, the organization never regains momentum.
The mistake is usually not the ambition of the goal.
In practice, outcomes rarely determine results on their own. Habits and processes do. They form the narrow bridge between intention and reality.
Changing a target doesn’t change behavior. Changing what happens every day does.
Consider a sales team with aggressive quarterly goals. If mornings drift into casual conversations, coffee breaks, or a quick game of Tischfußball, results remain abstract. Nothing is technically wrong. Everyone is busy. Everyone is engaged. And yet, very little compounds.
When time is structured — when specific hours are reserved for outreach, follow-ups, and execution — something shifts. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But reliably.
Momentum appears where repetition exists.
Small adjustments in daily behavior compound quietly. Progress accelerates without announcement. Breakthroughs tend to arrive suddenly, but they are almost always prepared by routine.
This is why long-term change rarely feels dramatic while it is happening. It feels mundane. Uneventful. Occasionally discouraging.
And yet, over time, it is decisive.
What people become is shaped less by the goals they set than by the patterns they repeat.
Step 4: Start Immediately
Even with a clear direction, a focused goal, and well-designed processes, many people still arrive at the end of the year with little to show for it.
The obstacle is rarely confusion. It’s delay.
A year feels long. Deadlines appear distant. There is always time to refine the plan, to improve the system, to think one more step ahead. January turns into February. February into spring. Momentum never quite begins.
The problem is not laziness. It is resistance.
Change feels uncomfortable before it feels normal. Actions that are unfamiliar — cold emails, outreach, difficult conversations — carry friction. They invite hesitation. Questions multiply. Avoidance becomes easy to justify.
Habits, however, don’t form through intention. They form through exposure.
The only reliable way to reduce resistance is to act before comfort arrives.
That action does not need to be impressive. It needs to be immediate.
If the goal for the year is a meaningful increase in revenue, the first move doesn’t have to resemble the end state. It might be ten short messages to people already known. A simple note. An imperfect sentence. Something sent.
The value lies not in the quality of the first attempt, but in breaking inertia.
One final detail matters more than it appears.
After taking that first step, write it down. Not as a performance review, but as a record. What was done. What felt difficult. What moved.
Over time, these small entries accumulate evidence. They document effort. They make progress visible. They support a shift in identity — from someone who plans to someone who acts.
In moments of doubt, that record becomes an anchor. Proof that movement has already begun.
Change rarely announces itself at the start. It reveals itself later, looking back.
There is a useful way to think about how progress actually begins.
Ed Sheeran once described his approach to songwriting as working with an old, clogged tap. At first, when you turn it on, what comes out isn’t usable. Mud. Dirt. Noise. Only after letting it run for a while does the water begin to clear.
The same principle applies to most meaningful goals.
Early effort is rarely elegant. Direction is often uncertain. The first attempts feel unremarkable, sometimes even discouraging. But movement itself matters more than precision at the beginning.
Starting creates information. Repetition creates clarity. Over time, what once felt forced begins to flow.
Many people wait for confidence, for certainty, for the right plan. In practice, those things tend to arrive only after action has already begun.
The pattern is simple, if uncomfortable: choose carefully, stay present, work the process, and start before it feels natural.
By the time it does, something important has already changed.
Conferences fail for the same reason resolutions do: no structure after intention.
In my 1:1 coaching, we turn conference conversations into a clear follow-up system that actually closes deals.
If JP Morgan or Bio Europe is on your calendar, now is the moment to set it up.
Upcoming Events - Meet our Podcast Guest Alasdair Milton, KPMG at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference
Podcast Episodes and Clips
EP 168 - Alasdair Milton: The Innovation Inflection Point: Why 70% of Cures Never Reach Patients
#167: Pattern Breakers — 7 Laws Behind Category-Defining Companies
Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life
Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the few Austrians who conquered the United States on every level. Bodybuilder. Movie icon. Governor.
How did he do it? With a simple, repeatable blueprint he lays out in Be Useful.
What makes this book worth reading for entrepreneurs is how universal that blueprint is.
The principles Schwarzenegger used to build his life are the same principles successful companies use in their planning and execution. He explains them through his story, but they apply to any founder, any industry.
If you want a practical, energizing framework for your next chapter, this book is a great place to start.
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