If You've Already Failed Your Resolution, Here's How to Recover

They say an old dog can’t learn new tricks, and at the end of the first week of each January, I tend to agree.

Kicking old habits is hard enough, but having new ones take root is an entirely different proposition. Particularly when we're no longer talking about hitting the gym more often or dabbling in lightweight habit swaps, and begin poking at identity-altering transitions. Herein lie the behavioral renovations that require more than a new pair of running shoes and a hopeful grin.

Sure enough, humanity’s collective track record with keeping promises made in the name of self-improvement isn’t exactly stellar. But we’re not entirely incorrigible either—quite the contrary.

Look around, and you’ll see change a-plenty. Enough to make you wonder if some of us are shapeshifters, or like Heraclitus’s river, a place you can step into only once. You don’t even need to strain your neck that much to spot the evidence; just audit your own life and see how far you’ve come from where you started.

The problem with resolutions isn’t the absence of change; instead, it is the absence of keeping track of it. Or put in shorthand, we love the drama of transformation, but we hate the admin of it.

Recent research published this year drives the point home with uncomfortable precision. Martins van Jaarsveld et al. (2025) examined goal pursuit and behavioral consistency, showing that self-monitoring significantly predicts sustained progress, outperforming goal-setting intensity and even personal reflection frequency.

Their findings confirm something most of us intuitively feel but rarely operationalize. We know that monitoring matters just as we know that when structured tracking is missing, progress often stalls, regardless of how meaningful or well-defined the goal might be.

We can craft the perfect goal and infuse it with noble intent and straddle it with ceremony as much as we like. We can even reflect on it until we reach spiritual enlightenment, but without monitoring, the actionable cousin of accountability, that goal still behaves like a New Year’s confetti cannon that is as loud as it is brief.

I learned this the way most people learn their hardest lessons: by watching my own system fail under the weight of its own optimism.

How I'll be Implementing Monitoring, Beginning Today

The gentle promise I made myself for the beginning of this year was that I’d knock out one of Angela Duckworth’s so-called hard things and finally launch my TikTok channel. To date, this project has seen dozens of drafts (none deemed good enough—for good reason, believe me) to publish.

This is why I told myself that come the 1st of January, the channel goes up, come hell or high water. It is now the 7th of January—and while I am dozens of drafts closer, I remain hundreds of miles away from taking the leap.

There are many reasons why I haven’t nailed my resolution, and key among them is how I built the goal but never built the runway. You see, while I set a clear goal—and an entirely actionable one at that—I didn’t set up the scaffolding to keep me on track. And, as Martins van Jaarsveld and her colleagues showed us, the scaffolding that I was missing is everything.

So that’s why I’m changing things up beginning today.

Immediately after writing this post, a bright yellow Post-it note goes up on my wall that says “The life I want.” Underneath it, in bold, reads three words: teach, write, and impact. These are the high-level goals that were always inside me, but I took decades too long to listen to.

And right underneath that note, I’m placing three more: one transactional tracker for each goal to be updated daily. Under impact, the first word is TikTok. Because if I want the life I want, I need to expand my audience from the $100,000-a-semester lecture halls to the place where anyone can become my student, as long as I offer something worthy of learning.

From now on, I won’t be staring only at the goal, which, without action, remains simply a wish, but at the steps I know I need to take to make it happen. A plan without monitoring is like a list written in steam on the bathroom mirror; it'll be gone before you dry your hair.

Whatever your resolution is, the same process is likely to work on you as well. Sometimes we set ourselves up to fail by building goals that are too tall and timelines that are too thin. Sometimes we undersell ourselves by aiming too low. But in each case, the goal itself remains almost secondary. What determines follow-through is the system that surrounds the goal, not the poetry that describes the goal.

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The Recovery Plan

1. Pick a goal worth failing at. If the goal is too easy, you won’t respect it. If it’s too vague, you can’t monitor it. Pick something with enough edges to matter if you make it.
2. Build the tracking system. Do this before you set even one foot forward.
3. Make the tracking visible. Friction is your friend here—and if it annoys you, it’s working.
4. Expect the first versions to suck. And allow the second and third versions to do that, too. Tracking includes surviving the early embarrassment stage long enough to improve.
5. Remember that recovery is not a singular moment or a goal you reach. It is a pattern of check-ins that refuses to let you ghost yourself.

If the last 39 years are anything to go by, I will need each step from above and much more than neon sticky notes, but it is a start. Hopefully you will find your beginning somewhere in this post as well.