NYE is basically the world’s biggest collective planning meeting with zero agenda and too much champagne.
We gather around a countdown like it’s a project plan. Ten… nine… eight… and somehow the number itself is supposed to do the heavy lifting. As if time, when spoken loudly enough, turns into character.
There’s a reason this night works on us. Temporal landmarks such as New Year’s and birthdays, create a psychological “before/after” line that makes change feel easier to start. Behavioral scientists call this the fresh start effect. It’s real. It’s measurable. But, it’s also wildly overconfident. The fresh start is a spark that activates, but it’s very far away from being an engine of change.
The engine is the system that takes over when it’s February. When the champagne is gone, the calendar is back, and your motivational spark has quit the job. This is where we usually can observe how people try to solve a systems problem with a personality promise. This is the moment we realize we’ve tried to solve a systems problem with a personality promise. We expect ‘New Year Me’ to be a different person, when in reality, ‘New Year Me’ is just ‘Old Year Me’ with a headache.
And honestly… I’m not above it. This year, I decided for a last-minute coffee detox. Not as a spiritual awakening. More as an honest admission that coffee got out of hand, and NYE felt like a socially accepted moment to intervene. The action is meaningful. The timing is mostly theatre. (Also: nothing says “fresh start” like choosing irritability.)
NYE sells cinematic change.
But, change is built differently.
A year of change is more like a minimum viable year.
Not the year where you become a new person. More like a year where progress is still possible on a bad Tuesday. The year that doesn’t require emotional runway. The year that runs on “boring wins”, the repeatable actions you still do when you’re tired, busy, slightly cynical, and low on patience.
“Boring wins” are some kind of a behavioral wiring. Research consistently shows that automaticity grows gradually and unevenly, often taking far longer than the internet’s magical “21 days.” One well-known study found it takes a median of 66 days to reach ‘asymptotic automaticity’. That’s the tipping point where an action finally stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like an autopilot. In other words: the boring part is the mechanism that decides on your success of change.
The most unimpressive thing I did this year was also the thing that changed my trajectory month to month: I wrote every week. Just… consistently enough that my brain stopped treating writing like a single event. Week to week, it looks like nothing. Month to month, it compounds.
And that’s the advantage of boring wins: they create progress over time.
There’s also a leadership angle here that’s worth stealing for January. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s work on the progress principle argues that small wins (real progress on meaningful work) are one of the strongest drivers of motivation and “inner work life.”Progress is the key.
So, here is the challenge for the “midnight optimist” in all of us: Don’t design your year around the countdown. Design it around the boring wins that can survive the week.
And don’t pick ten. Pick one.
Use an implementation intention. An if-then plan that links a cue to a response: “If it is Wednesday at 8:30 AM, then I write for 30 minutes.” It’s not the marathon but the five-minute stretch while the kettle boils. Implemetation intentios are a reliably help to close the gap between aspiration and action by linking a cue to a response.
But be careful. A boring win is only a win if it sits on the critical path to something that matters. Writing worked for me, but for someone else, “writing every week” might just be a beautiful, elegant form of procrastination… a way to feel productive while avoiding a harder, scarier truth.
As the clock hits zero, don’t look for a new personality. Look for a better rhythm. The most transformative thing you do this year likely won’t happen under a shower of confetti, but on a cold Tuesday morning in February when no one is watching.
Go big tonight.
Go boring tomorrow.
Happy New Year!