you do not need a new you
free, on one page.

what you’ll work through

1. pick the wall, and it can be arbitrary. january the first is random, and the randomness is the mechanism rather than the flaw. a landmark files your past failures in a previous period, so you stop carrying eleven attempts into the twelfth. Dai, Milkman and Riis measured this in 2014: searches for diet, gym visits and goal commitments all rise after the start of a week, a month, a year, a semester, a birthday or a holiday.
2. you get about seventy a year. 52 mondays, 12 first-of-the-months, four seasons, one birthday, and every day you come back from somewhere different, move house or start a job. waiting for january is turning down sixty-nine other chances.
3. the ten days are for installing, not for impressing. a landmark is a starting device and people use it as a sustaining device. it buys about ten days of unusual willingness and then it stops. the worst thing to do with them is something impressive. the right thing is to build what runs after the motivation has gone.
4. make the first version the sick-in-bed version. the burst pushes you toward the ambitious version, which is exactly the one you will not keep. pick the version you could do while tired and unwell in your own room. ten minutes counts.
5. make it entertaining, or it runs on willpower alone. if the activity itself gives you nothing, the only fuel is the landmark, and that ran out on day ten. anything that makes the doing of it enjoyable is worth more than any amount of resolve.
6. plan the restart before you need it. everyone breaks the plan, including a small well-adjusted one. breaking it is not the failure. stopping when you break it is, and the way that happens is you turn one missed day into a verdict about who you are.