New Year’s Resolution Motivation Compilation (2025)

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If you have a New Year’s resolution planned this year, then just start doing it today. The more days you wait until you start, the more practice you’ll get thinking about it and not doing it, which is the exact opposite of the stimulus-response pattern you want.

This 1-week period between Christmas and New Year’s is the perfect time to build up daily momentum on a new habit.

The key to sticking to any resolution is building a long-term habit, and the key to that is actually pulling the trigger and kicking it off with a weeks-long streak.

Lots of people try to start a New Year’s resolution but don’t build up enough momentum beforehand to keep them going when the rhythm and pressures of normal daily life kick back in.

You probably have extra time on your hands this next week. Why not use it to build up momentum?

If you have a resolution and you’re waiting until New Year’s Day to start it, then you’re ngmi because you won’t act unless there’s some special occasion to motivate you. Just do it today. Prove to yourself that you don’t need a special occasion.

Wishing the best of health to you, your family, and your habits in 2025. Remember that the best predictor of who you’ll become is what your current habits are. So keep your good habits going, lock in some new ones, and drop some bad ones.

Beginners of anything: habit is the key to success, and consistency is the key to habit.

Don’t be like one of those gym noobs who works out 4 hours their first day, takes a week off because they’re too sore to move, and never comes back.

A trick for sticking to your New Year’s resolution, that lots of people get wrong:

Make the habit easily repeatable.

Don’t make it such a “big thing” that you do it one day and dread doing it the next day.

You know what happens to people who start their New Year’s weight loss resolution off with 3 hours at the gym every day?

They come for one day and then don’t come back!

So don’t do that.

Instead, start out with a volume of work that’s small enough that you don’t dread doing it again the next day.

It doesn’t matter if the volume of daily work is too small to achieve your long-term goals in the timeframe you want.

Eventually, as you build up a habit and your mind/body adapt to whatever it is you’re doing, it will feel easier to ramp up the volume of work until you’re moving at a pace that puts you on track to accomplish your long-term goals.

So don’t worry about total volume of work at the beginning. Just focus on consistency. As the habit sets in and you adapt, you’ll find it easier to increase your volume of work.

And as the habit settles into your identity, you’ll actually want to increase that volume of work.

Imagine where you’d be right now if you had done 30 high-intensity minutes of structured upskilling each day in 2024. That can be you at the end of 2025.

How to cultivate discipline in 2025:

When there’s something that you know you should do, but you can’t get yourself to do, it means some habit is pulling you away from doing it.

So what you need to do is tear down the unproductive habit and build up a counter-habit whose gravity eventually becomes strong enough to completely overtake the original habit.

You try to disrupt your momentum on your negative habit and create momentum towards a positive habit.

And while you might not be able to do this all in one fell swoop, what you can do is iterate on it and gradually ease into a transition one little step at a time.

Here’s a concrete example which may or may not apply to you but hopefully it will illustrate the main idea.

Let’s say you’re having trouble cultivating discipline with exercising every day.

The first question is: what’s keeping you from exercising?

Maybe you plan to exercise after work but then things come up and you always find an excuse.

Okay, so do it first thing in the morning.

Why aren’t you already doing it first thing in the morning?

Let’s say it’s because you have a habit of waking up 15 minutes before you have to leave for work and there’s not enough time for exercise.

That habit is pulling you away from your goal of daily exercise. So you need to gradually replace it with a more productive habit.

Maybe instead of waking up 15 minutes before work, you wake up 20 minutes before and spend 5 minutes doing jumping jacks as soon as you get out of bed.

(Or if 5 minutes is too daunting then maybe you start with just 1 or 2 minutes and gradually build up to 5 minutes.)

After enough days of waking up 5 minutes earlier fkr 5 minutes of jumping jacks, you’ll have created a “new normal” morning routine, and you’ll find it within yourself to wake up another 5 minutes earlier and replace your 5 minutes of jumping jacks with a 10-minute run.

You keep going this direction, gradually tearing down your habit of waking up just before you have to leave, and building up a habit of waking up earlier and earlier and doing more and more exercise with that extra time.

Eventually you reach your desired fitness routine goal and then you just maintain that habit into the future.

Don’t have a passion? Go create one in 2025. Be disciplined, set up a habit, compound compound compound, develop a relationship with it, put in extra time when you’re bored or you need an emotional outlet, trust that it will grow on you and seep into your identity as you spend a lot of time doing it and getting really good at it.

It’s just like developing a close human relationship. You might not have a strong bond with the person initially but you get along “enough” at the beginning and over time you get to know each other so well, you go through so much shit together, that you are inseparable.

First step is always the hardest. Don’t even think about the rest of the journey right now. Just focus on taking that second step tomorrow. Enough steps and it will become a second-nature habit, just like brushing your teeth every day. You’ll fall into a rhythm and eventually you’ll look up and be amazed at how far you’ve come.

Day 1 of your New Year’s resolution in the books? The name of the game from here on forward is consistency – you maintain a consistent habit, you’ll be amazed how high you can climb. Most things take months or years of consistent effort, but when you’ve got a solid habit, time passes by quickly.

Stick with it, stay consistent, it’s okay to have some lighter days but keep the habit of daily practice going. The habit is what’s going to ease the psychological friction and carry you through the long game.

First step is always the hardest. From here on, the key is consistency. Just keep taking another step each day. Doesn’t really matter how big each step is yet. Just get into the habit of taking steps. Once you’re doing that consistently, you can work on increasing your stride length.

Have a New Year’s resolution? Make it a daily habit just like brushing your teeth. It’s a long game and consistency is key.

Take a step each day, doesn’t matter if it’s a baby step, all that matters is it’s a step. It’s a long game and the way you win a long game is by building a habit. Consistency is key.

Ask me who you’ll become and I’ll ask you what your habits are.

The most likely trajectory you’ll follow is the one traced out by your habits compounding infinitely into the future.

The habit is what’s going to carry you though the long term once the initial adrenaline wears off. Build your habit, protect it, and prove to yourself that your New Year’s resolution is more than just a couple-day surge of adrenaline.

Fell off the wagon with your New Year’s resolution? Time to rebuild the streak and carry it forward indefinitely.

The trick is to keep the habit going every single day, and if you’re super busy some day or you want to take a day off for the holiday, just reduce the amount of time if necessary.

You can do a quicker, easier workout or study session (even if it’s only 10 minutes!), but don’t skip it in its entirety.

That way, the amount of time is negligible, but you can still maintain momentum, protect your habit, and honestly feel good about still making a little bit of progress.

Fumbled your New Year’s resolution? Don’t worry, fumble doesn’t matter if you pick up the ball and keep running. It’s not a single fumble that gets you, it’s when a series of consecutive fumbles deconstructs your habit. You recover a fumble, you keep the habit, you’re all good.

An off day won’t derail your habit, but an off week might, and an off month will.

Don’t worry about the long-term too much. Just make sure you’re making progress week by week, month by month. If you keep on making short-term progress then the long-term will sort itself out. Just like running a marathon, take it one mile at a time.

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