How to Successfully Fail Your New Year’s Resolution
Well, it’s New Year’s Day and that means you’re probably thinking about making some kind of resolution. So many articles have been written about how to make good resolutions. Because you’re probably bored of those, I’m going to show you how to set up your resolution and execute it in such a way you’ll almost certainly fail. Here, you’ll learn all you need to know if you want to completely and utterly screw up your New Year’s resolution as quickly as possible.
Keep your goal vague. What better way to fail at a resolution than by making it as nebulous as possible. Making it based on something you can objectively measure? Ridiculous. Having a solid deadline so you can plan out milestones? What nonsense. If you’re going to fail spectacularly, you’ll need to be so vague that it’s impossible to know whether you’ve succeeded or not. By doing this, you make it so that not only do you fail, you make it so you can’t learn anything from your failure. Talk about win-win. Remember, if you have no target, you can’t possibly hit it.
Make massive changes. But let’s say you already screwed up the first step and actually have a measurable and specific goal with a deadline. How are you supposed to sabotage your own success? No need to worry. You can still blow it by trying to make huge, unsustainable changes to your life. Say you said you wanted to lose ten pounds by March 1st. To fail at that resolution, don’t do things like add a daily ten minute walk or replace soda with water. The next step would be to go to the gym six times per week for two hours a day. This is an excellent strategy to fail because it ensures that you’ll become burnt out and avoid the gym at all costs. True, you might lose a few pounds in the beginning. But the beauty of this approach is that it’s so unsustainable that you won’t get beyond losing those few pounds. You might even gain them back by the time your deadline hits because you’ve shunned the gym like Pigpen from Peanuts shuns a bath.
Make lots of changes. Now the above point would be good for your failure, but we’re trying to guarantee it. Let’s say you’re doing a good job with the massive change. We need to fix that by adding multiple massive changes. Not only will you go to the gym six times per week for two hours a day, you’ll also switch to a vegan ketogenic diet, quit smoking, start getting up at five in the morning, sell your car and bicycle everywhere, read a book a week, and meditate for half an hour every morning. The beauty of this is that it requires so much willpower and energy that you can’t possibly sustain all these new changes. You’ll fail them one by one, but ideally in pairs or trios. By the time February rolls around, you’ll have thrown your hands up and given up all of those things. To make matters even better, your confidence in your ability to make changes in your life will be so shatter that you won’t even think of trying again until at least the following New Year.
Be a perfectionist. Finally, if you’ve somehow done the wrong thing by having a measurable, specific goal with a deadline, made small changes that build good habits, and have adopted them one at a time, there’s still a way to make sure you don’t fulfill your resolution. Enter perfectionism. You’re human, which means you’re bound to make a mistake or miss a workout or eat food that’s not on the diet sooner or later. Rather than accepting this when it happens and going back onto the plan, simply flagellate yourself and give up because of the stain you’ve made on your previously immaculate adherence to the plan. Don’t get back on the horse and try again, learning from your mistake and improving. Instead see yourself as being a loser who can’t do anything right and abandon all hope. Go right back to your pre-New Year’s ways with a vengeance.
If you follow these four steps, you’ll completely screw up your resolution in no time at all. In addition to not achieving what you originally set out to achieve and growing as a person through the process, you’ll also be able to wallow in self-loathing and despair at the impossibility of making changes in your life. If you really do this right, you’ll also end up feeling bitter and resentful toward people who didn’t follow your plan and actually did what they set out to do. And the best part is that it’ll only be February. Who wouldn’t want to start their year this way?
