How to Change

I’ve described in this book—obstacles such as temptation, forgetfulness, underconfidence, and laziness—are like the symptoms of a chronic disease. They won’t just go away once you’ve started “treating” them. They’re human nature and require constant vigilance.

The bigger the landmark, the more likely it is to help us take a step back, regroup, and make a clean break from the past.

The students (many from the local junior college) whose environments hadn’t changed substantially mostly kept to their old routines, while their peers who had made a bigger transition were more likely to change their behavior.

But the calendar had nothing to do with it; Bob owed his fresh start to a meaningful life event.

We’re more likely to pursue change on dates that feel like new beginnings because these moments help us overcome a common obstacle to goal initiation: the sense that we’ve failed before and will, thus, fail again.

they feel like a different person—a person with reason to be optimistic about the future.

We also found that people’s birthdays were linked with more goal creation on stickK.

Hengchen, Jason, and I suspected that if people really felt that they were new and improved, it could, in some cases, be enough to help them overcome a meaningful obstacle to change.

Last year you couldn’t cut it at work or failed to quit smoking, but “that was the old me,” you think, “and this is the new me.”

With the shift to a new year, it’s almost as if past attempts to stay off social media, earn As in school, be a better colleague, and eat healthier can be dismissed as the failures of another person