As you're presumably aware, this is a terrible mindset for actually making lasting changes. What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress (" small wins"), plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh- startism is a form of perfectionism, and

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The reason this is so liberating, for anyone with even a hint of perfectionism, is that it means you get to give up on the exhausting struggle to take charge of your life, so as to steer it in a new direction. You get to abandon all hope of one day finding the perfect time management system– or perfect relationship, job, neighborhood, etcetera– and

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The other day, I asked a friend what she wanted to let go of from this year. “Everything,” she said. “Complete self-erasure.” We laughed—at the absurdity of it, and at the thin, uncomfortable filament of truth running through the joke. How often we look back on a year with a prosecutorial eye, tallying what we didn’t finish, the habits we couldn’t... See more