61. How To Outsmart Your Resolutions With Strategy So That They Stick
Here is the scene. You swear you will go running tomorrow. Tomorrow arrives. So does rain and a croissant. Suddenly, the morning jog turns into a coffee date with yourself, starring a pastry that insists it is “self-care” on a plate.
Acrasia: When Knowing Is Not Doing
The Greeks had a word for this pattern: acrasia, doing the opposite of what you know is good for you. Plato thought that if you truly understood the good, you would automatically follow it, while Aristotle pointed out that desire can simply overrule reason. You see it in everyday life: people genuinely want to stick to their health habits, sleep routines, or exercise plans, yet they quietly slide back into old patterns. It is not stupidity. It is the constant pull between quick comfort and long-term meaning.
Why Resolutions Are Bad Strategy
Management thinker Richard Rumelt, in his book “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy,” explains that many “strategies” fail because they are just slogans pretending to be plans. Most New Year’s resolutions behave exactly like that:
- “Be healthier” or “get my life together” sound powerful but say nothing about what you will do on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
- There is no diagnosis, no honest “this is where I usually fall apart.”
- Everything rests on willpower, which tends to disappear right around the time the fridge light comes on.
Acrasia loves this setup. It lives in the gap between big promises and zero structure.
Turn Resolutions Into Strategy
Let us take one example and keep it: “I want to exercise regularly.” Here is how strategy changes it.
- Diagnose the real problem Instead of “I am lazy,” try “I plan evening workouts, but by 7 p.m. I am exhausted, hungry, and my sofa is closer than the gym.” Now the issue is timing and energy, not your moral worth.
- Create a guiding policy for that problem Based on that diagnosis, a guiding policy could be: “Exercise early, before the day tires me out, and make it as easy as possible to start.” This gives a direction for every future choice about movement.
- Design tiny, coherent actions that match the policy From that policy, you might decide:
- lay out workout clothes by the bed every night
- do a ten-minute walk or short routine right after coffee, not after work
- on very bad mornings, at least stretch for three minutes so the habit does not break.
- All of these actions serve the same strategy: make morning movement simple and inevitable.
- Anchor that same example in your values Finally, you tie this exercise habit to something that matters: “I move in the morning because I want to hit middle age with the energy and body of someone who still gets mistaken for the intern.” It becomes about future freedom, not punishment for past croissants.
A Kinder Way To Fail
Acrasia is not proof that you are broken. It is proof that you are human, stuck between intention and temptation. Writer Susan Sontag once put it this way: “Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.” This January, instead of promising a completely new you, you could try something closer to that: a little more kindness for yourself, and just enough courage to take the next small step.
So this year, if you want to outsmart your resolutions with strategy, do not make them louder. Make them smarter: one clear diagnosis, one simple guiding policy, a few tiny actions you might actually do. And if the croissant wins sometimes, let it, as long as it does not win every round.
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