October 13th

Hi friend,

How many times have you decided that something in your life would change starting Monday? The diet, the gym, the project you keep putting off. You know the Monday after that will look much like this one, and you pick the date anyway, because a fresh week feels like a fresh chance in a way a Wednesday afternoon never does.

A team of researchers at the Wharton School, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis, set out to learn whether that feeling shows up in what people actually do. In 2014 they published three studies built on real behaviour rather than questionnaires.

People’s Google searches for the word diet rose at the start of every week, every month and every year, and after public holidays. Goal commitments on stickK, a website where people sign contracts with themselves to reach a target, rose at the same moments.

Pull up the gym records from their university and the pattern repeats. Visits climbed at the start of a new week, a new month and a new semester, and they climbed after one more kind of date as well: a person’s own birthday.

You would think a date could not matter. The thirteenth of October is no different in kind from the twelfth. Nothing in your body or your bank account changed at midnight, and the problems you went to sleep with are the same ones you woke up with.

But the mind does not keep time the way a calendar does. It keeps it in chapters. The researchers argued that certain dates draw a line under a chapter, and once the line is drawn, everything on the far side of it, the missed sessions, the abandoned plans, the version of you who kept slipping, starts to feel as though it belonged to someone else.

In a follow-up paper they gave the idea a title that says it plainly: put your imperfections behind you. A fresh start works because it lets you stop carrying the record of old attempts into the new one.

Researchers proposed a second reason too. A landmark lifts your attention out of the daily detail and toward the shape of your life as a whole, which is the only angle from which a big goal ever looks worth the effort.

That makes these dates useful, and most people waste them, because the energy arrives and nothing is waiting to receive it.

Here is how to use one properly. Decide in advance which landmark you will start on, so the date does the work instead of your mood. Write down what the new chapter is for, in one sentence, before it begins. Pick one change rather than seven, since a fresh start spread across everything becomes a resolution that is dead by February. And give it a time and a place on the first day, so the motivation has somewhere to go.

Don’t wait for January to do this. There is a landmark at the start of every week and every month, and there are a few each year that belong to you alone.

And if today happens to be the first day of a new year for you, for whatever reason, I hope it turns out to be the best one you have had so far, and that you leave every imperfection of the last one behind you.

You get to decide what this chapter is for.

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill