Most people (estimated at 88%) fail at their New Year’s Resolutions each year. I find that a stunning statistic. Here are people who want to change something about their life, but they don’t succeed at doing so.
Of course, some resolutions are just undoable (be healthier? what does that even mean?). But even the ones that are (don’t drink soda, stop smoking, get up early)… even those have a shockingly high failure rate.
Why? Well, making any kind of change in your life is fundamentally about changing habits. And changing habits can be really difficult! I have an untested theory that the ability to modify your own habits is THE KEY to success in life.
One of my resolutions for next year is about changing a couple of habits… but not just changing them. I want to use my process of habit change as a laboratory in order to learn how to make habit formation and modification easier, and — more importantly — how to leverage magic to do it.
Because it seems to me that the ability to change habits may just be the key to success in life. The more agile we can be about this, the better.
We all know people who made a major changes in their lives. Someone who actually dropped a significant amount of weight and kept it off. Someone who went from couch potato to running marathons. Someone who actually quit smoking or decided to dial up the optimism and stop complaining and then did it.
We look on these people with awe because they changed their habits… and we know that changing habits is hard.
Imagine if we could take that 88% down, even just 10%. That would be 10% more people who could change their lives in the way that they want. Who could decide to do something different… and then do it. That’s major stuff!
And if magic is for anything, it’s for changing lives. So how do we use magic to change habits? That’s what I’m going to try to figure out, deliberately, this coming year.
