Why We Fail Our New Year Resolutions

It’s 2026.

New Year Resolutions

What an odd spectacle.

We do it year after year. We buy notebooks, courses, gym memberships, planners (guilty of 3 of them). We tell ourselves this time is different, and we tell other people too, almost as if saying it out loud might make it come true.

A few weeks pass, you are meeting your goals, sometimes a month if we are disciplined. Then slowly, quietly, we end up right back where we started. The calendar changes, but very little else does.

I do not think resolutions fail because people are lazy. I think they fail because we treat change like a purchase. As if buying the right tools, the right systems, the right aesthetics will do the work for us. We invest in the image of discipline long before we build the discipline itself. This was a hard lesson for me to learn in 2025.

I realized how often I confused preparation with progress. I would redesign systems, tweak workflows, and tell myself I was building something serious. The email, the social media accounts, the design, everything BUT the actions. Those ideas ran wild in my head like Jumanji. In truth, I was spending more time making things look ready than actually working on them.

I played dress ups to feel disciplined. New templates, new routines, new structures that looked clean and intentional. For a moment, it felt like movement, but the hard part was still untouched: showing up.

There were days I spent hours organizing how something should be done instead of doing it. It looked responsible, and it felt productive, but it was still avoidance, just dressed better. And boy, do I know about dressing better.

What finally clicked was simple: Discipline is not aesthetic.

It does not care how good your system looks, though it certainly helps if you look good. But discipline ONLY, and ONLY responds to repetition, and repetition is ugly before it becomes effective.

Once I saw that, I could not unsee it.

There is also something comforting about resolutions. They delay responsibility, they let us believe that change starts later, on a cleaner date, in a version of ourselves that feels more prepared than the one we are today. January becomes a psychological buffer. It’s a date with your crush you’ve been waiting for.

As we all know, that nothing magical happens when the year changes, it’s the same person that wakes up on January first dressed in better intentions.

Maybe the problem with resolutions is not commitment, but honesty. We set goals that look good instead of goals that demand something uncomfortable from us, we aim for outcomes, not behavior change. And behavior change, I believe, can only be achieved from the old tradition of: repetition.

I know, how incredibly boring and unexciting.

While I do not think resolutions are a scam, I think of them like mirrors. They show us how often we want the feeling of progress without sitting through the process of it.

So maybe that is the real question worth asking this year.

Instead of asking yourself, what do you want to become, ask yourself what you are actually willing to repeat, even when it feels dull, ugly and unrewarding.

Like eating air-fried dry-rub chicken breast 6 days in a week. Yuck.

The Mess it Comes With

2025 taught me that the process is just as beautiful as the outcome. Not the clean kind of process you show after everything is finished, but the ugly one; the unfinished drafts.

I have always been a sucker for aesthetics. I still am. I believe beauty lives in the result, in things looking polished, intentional, well kept. I wanted my work, and myself, to appear composed at all times. I liked having control over how things looked, how they were perceived, and how complete they seemed.

But what I see now is that the mess deserves just as much respect. The mess is where the real work happens, it is where ideas get tested, where mistakes reveal direction, where shape begins to form before it ever becomes presentable. The beauty of the result does not exist without that phase, it is earned there.

I used to hide those imperfections. They just seemed not ready, why would I show them to the world? Who’d want to see that? So, there I was with a little more refining, a little more never ending tweaking.

In reality, that obsession with perfection left many projects unfinished, many ideas quietly retired, and more passion drained than I would like to admit. I was not protecting the work, I was avoiding exposure. Things were not unfinished because they were not ready, they were unfinished because I was not.

So I am entering 2026 with less interest in perfection, and more respect for momentum. Less attachment to how things look in their early stages, and more commitment to staying in motion even when the form is not clear yet.

If there is beauty in this year, it will not come from everything being neat. It will come from being honest enough to keep going while things are still forming, and having the patience to let that process shape me along the way.

New Year New You? No. New Year Better You.

Do not look for a fresh start this year. Fresh starts are tempting, but they often distract from the work that actually changes you.

Look for continuity instead. Keep showing up, especially on the days that feel ordinary. I’ve always believed ordinary days make room for extraordinary years.

Repeat what matters, especially when they feel dull or unrewarding. Stay with the mess long enough for it to shape into something real, instead of abandoning it the moment it becomes uncomfortable.

Progress does not come from dramatic reset, it comes from staying present with the same work, the same habits, and the same commitments long enough for them to compound.

Now that is a sexy way to enter 2026.