1: New Year’s resolutions don’t work.
“A survey of over 31 million activities by the team at Strava found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by January 12,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her book Tiny Experiments, “which they called Quitter’s Day.”
So, why do New Year’s resolutions fail?
Because we “overcommit to a bunch of lofty aspirations,” Anne-Laure explains. “The human mind has a love/hate relationship with effort. We are drawn to the idea of it, yet we would rather not have to put in actual effort.”
This phenomenon has its own term: The effort paradox.
“We mistakenly believe that we would be happier after overcoming a greater challenge,” she writes, so “we tend to select difficult paths precisely because they require more effort—even if it means we are more likely to fail.”
There is a better way. Instead, we can make a pact with ourselves: “An actionable commitment we will fulfill for a set period of time,” Anne-Laure suggests.
Like Valentin Loredo, who grew up in a family “where food was a big part of life,” she writes. He enjoyed cooking as a way to relax after a stressful day at work. “I liked the idea of getting back to learning and indulging in the joy of personal growth,” he says.
So, what did he do? He made a pact to spend three to five hours every weekend cooking in his small kitchen in Paris.
“It’s important that the action that constitutes our pact is simple and repeatable,” she writes. “For instance, our pact could be something we do every day, every weekend, or every week.”
We track our pact by asking a binary question: Have we done it or not? “Yes or no? This makes our progress easy to monitor,” Anne-Laure suggests.
Valentin stayed with it. “I tried new ways of doing things,” he recalls, “I searched online when I was stuck, I’d take photos and write down notes. I focused on improving and tweaking a little bit every time. And in the evening, I’d invite my friends for a full-course dinner so that they could taste the result.”
Eighteen months later, he “successfully passed the exam for one of the most rigorous culinary training courses in France,” Anne-Laure writes.
“It opened a world of possibilities,” he says. “Maybe in ten years I will open a restaurant, maybe not, but these skills will never be lost.”
2: A pact is the first protocol of personal growth. When we make a pact with ourselves, we are embracing a life of experiments.
We are also committing ourselves to action. Not stagnation.
“Many new possibilities will open when we switch from a linear mindset to an experimental mindset and focus on showing up rather than perfecting everything,” she explains. We “now have access to the power of experiments rooted in our own curiosity.”
When we embrace “an experimental mindset,” Anne-Laure writes, we adopt “an attitude of openness and curiosity, a willingness to learn with a sense of receptiveness, and a lack of preconceived notions.”
What we are curious about points us to the path, she suggests, “from exploring a new hobby to learning a new skill, gauging a potential career path, or trying out a new routine.
“A pact can be easy, such as two weeks of daily stretching, or it can be more ambitious, such as creating a digital illustration every week for the next three months.
“It can help us test our assumptions,” Anne-Laure writes, “when it comes to our work (e.g., blocking two hours for reading and creative thinking on Mondays for a month), our health (e.g., going to bed at the same time every day for a week), or our relationships (e.g., date night with your spouse every other Saturday for six months).”
Creating a pact is also liberating. “People who complete this exercise during my workshops report feeling confident that they can now move forward,” she writes. “As AI engineer Artur Piszek wrote: ‘The pact was my favorite [activity] because choosing what to work on is the highest leverage.'”
3: One thing we don’t control? How we feel. We can’t force ourselves to feel motivated.
“Action seems to follow feeling,” psychologist William James once observed. “But really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
Making a pact is about doing. Not planning. “That’s why ‘I will learn how to code’ is a flawed pact,” Anne-Laure writes, “but ‘I will code every day for a hundred days’ is a great one.”
We don’t say: “I will write a book.” Instead, we commit: “I will write every weekday for the next six months.”
Instead of “I will run a marathon,” we say, “I will run every Sunday for six weeks.”
Because one action begets another. Which builds momentum. Not motivation. We “just need to get started and trust that we will naturally build confidence through repetition,” Anne-Laure predicts.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What small, consistent action could I commit to that would move me closer to my goals?
Action: Choose one simple, repeatable pact (such as “I will [action] every [day/week] for [duration]”) and track my progress with a daily yes/no check.