Want to Achieve All Those Ambitious New Year’s Goals? Think Small.

New Year’s resolutions get a bad rap—- and not without good reason. It is estimated that by February, 80 percent of people fail to keep their resolutions and only 8 percent manage to follow through by the end of the year. 

New Year’s resolutions appear to have become synonymous with inevitable failure, which probably explains why so many people don’t even bother making them in the first place. Grim statistics aside, in 2022 I decided to play the New Year’s resolution game. And by some miracle, by the end of the year I had not only reached all my goals, I had far surpassed every benchmark I had set for myself. 

How did I do it? My first step was picking up the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Atomic Habits

As a sucker for the self-improvement genre, I read a lot of books about goal-setting, but none have stuck with me quite like this book. Clear’s unique goal-achieving strategy focuses less on the big picture target and instead places emphasis on the small incremental changes a person can make to their daily routines that will eventually result in huge positive changes. In fact, Clear doesn’t even like discussing these target changes in terms of “goals” at all. He prefers to use the term “systems.”

As he writes:

“​​You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.”

This perspective immediately had a huge impact on me. 

How many of us start the new year with lofty goals that are far outside our realm of capability? If, for example, we want to bench press 200 lbs, we aren’t going to mozy on into the gym on January 1 crush it right away. Weight lifting requires a slow building of the muscles needed to give us the physical competence to reach the desired ends.

One of my 2022 goals was to run four eight-minute miles a day. When I started, I could barely run one 12-minute mile. That first morning at the gym, I didn’t try to run a ten-minute mile or even try to run four miles at all. I started so small it was almost laughable. 

I jogged for 30 minutes at a glacial pace. I did that every day for a week. Once I proved to myself that I was capable not only of doing the 30 minutes but also getting up at 5:30 every morning and walking to the gym for my workout, I had a foundation in place, or a system if you will, that set me up to later jog for an hour, which then became running for an hour, which then became running four miles every morning.

According to Clear, starting with my 30-minute jog was more ambitious than it needed to be in the beginning. For some people in pursuit of a fitness goal, starting by simply driving to the gym, parking outside and then going home is still a great place to begin. This might seem absurd to some, but as Clear says “Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.”

If all you can do at the beginning is drive yourself to the gym, you’re still closer to running those miles than you would have been staying in bed. The point is to start creating the systems that will slowly help you reach success.

Clear later adds, “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound and turn into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.”

The Myth of Overnight Success

The slow burn approach to success can be hard for our psyche to handle, especially when the passing away of another year makes us crave for dramatic changes. But our most important milestones aren’t reached overnight.

“Maybe there are people who can achieve incredible success overnight. I don’t know any of them and I’m certainly not one of them,” says Clear, who has a unique perspective on the matter.

As a teen athlete, a freak baseball accident nearly killed him and left him with brain damage. As he embarked on the slow recovery process, he learned to take baby steps in the right direction that eventually compounded into massive changes. And through those small changes, he pulled himself through recovery to become the author he is today.

He recalls:

“There wasn’t one defining moment in my journey from medically induced coma to academic all-American. It was a gradual evolution … The only way to make progress, the only choice I had, was to start small.”

In my own life, the success I had with my running was so encouraging, I started applying the atomic habits approach in other areas of my life as well. Therein lies the true beauty of Clear’s book.

Whether you are trying to push yourself harder in the gym, recover from a traumatic brain injury, or reach professional goals that will further your career, Atomic Habits has great advice for helping you conquer your 2024 New Year’s resolutions.