New Year’s Resolutions

Hey friends,

You’ve probably heard about how most people don’t end up sticking to their New Year’s Resolutions. They buy gym memberships in January, go a handful of times and then stop bothering. Or they decide to eat more healthily, that lasts about a week, and then they revert back to their default state.

A few years ago, I discovered a fun and easy way to make New Year’s Resolutions more likely to stick. And that’s simply to start them a week or two early.

The problem with New Year’s Resolutions is that we give them far too much weighting in our collective culture. It feels a ‘big deal’ to make a vow to ourselves that we’ll do this ‘big’ thing from January 1st and keep it up for the whole year.

If however, we start on 16th December, it feels like less of a big deal and more like a simple change we could really have made whenever we wanted.

This has helped me stick to a few different resolutions over the years, although admittedly I’ve still got plenty that have fallen by the wayside.

Have a great week!

Ali

PS: 12 months ago, I wrote almost this exact email to this mailing list of 4,034 subscribers. Now we’re on 17,860 subscribers. I don’t even really look at the numbers anymore, but I think they illustrate the power of consistency, of just showing up repeatedly. I wish I cared as much about the gym or healthy eating…

This week on the Podcast

Not Overthinking is the weekly podcast hosted by me and my brother. If you enjoy these emails, you’ll hopefully like that too. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Castro (my favourite podcast app) or any other podcast app – just search for ‘Not Overthinking’.

How to get rich (without getting lucky) – Tweet Discussion | Not Overthinking

In this episode, we discuss a Tweetstorm entitled “How to get rich (without getting lucky)” by Naval Ravikant. We touch on (1) wealth vs money, (2) financial freedom, (3) long-term thinking, (4) leverage, and (5) becoming the best in the world at what you do.

My Favourite Things this Week

1 – Podcast – As usual, Farnam Street’s podcast The Knowledge Project knocked it out of the park with this episode featuring relationship expert Esther Perel – she reveals her favorite strategies for “fighting” fair, rewriting stories that damage relationships, and breathing new life into our romantic partnerships. Lots of interesting insights here, even if (like me) you’re not in a relationship 😛

2 – Blog post – One of my new favourite bloggers, Tynan, wrote a piece about consistency that really resonated with me. It reminded me of something I think a lot about – that consistency is one of the greater superpowers that we can develop. You might also like the Not Overthinking podcast episode where my brother and I discuss our struggles with consistency.

3 – Podcast – This episode of Bulletproof Radio was an excellent interview with one of my gurus Gary Vaynerchuk – they talked about how he thinks about success, gratitude, legacy, and what really matters in life. There wasn’t anything here that was particularly new to me, but I’ve been following Gary Vee’s stuff for years. I just thought it was a nice reminder of a lot of important things, and if you aren’t as familiar with Gary’s stuff then it’s definitely worth a listen (but skip the first 5 minutes or so of the podcast which are just ads lol).

Kindle Highlight of the Week

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways-operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes-makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them-as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go-end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

From The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. Resurfaced with Readwise.

This week’s video