✴️ #29 - New Year's Resolutions are Dangerous

Author

Ben Jang
December 22, 2024 

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✏️ Summary

  • Setting goals can be dangerous

  • Watch out for arbitrary time limits (“I’ll start after…”)

  • If you can do it when conditions aren’t ideal, you can do it when they are

Last week, one of my colleagues wanted to read a book. Ikigai, by Héctor García. I want to encourage people to achieve their goals, and the book sounded interesting, so I offered her an accountability rule.

Every day, she has to read one page and tell me what it says. That way, she is accountable to me for the page, and I get to read the book by proxy. She agreed.

On the first day, she forgot.

On the second day, she returned with enthusiasm. "Ikigai refers to the crossover between four aspects of your character!" She explained, showing me a photo on her phone.

On the third day, she was too busy.

On the fourth again, too busy.

On the fifth day, I decided to challenge her.

"I'm going to stop checking on the reading " I told her.

"Why?" She seemed surprised.

"Well, did you read a page today?"

"No.." she replied.

"That's why."

Then she said something I found surprising.

"Well, in the new year, you won't need to ask me - I'll just read multiple pages anyways." It seemed like a promise to herself, more than to me.

And here is why I think setting goals can be dangerous. What changes about you between now and the new year? The only real change is that time passes. Don't slow down just because society tells you to.

Be very careful about setting arbitrary start lines. If you decided to start in the new year, why not tomorrow? Why not right now? If the answer is not "because I am working on something more important until then", that is procrastination in disguise.

The best time to start working is precisely when you don't want to: when everyone else clocks off, and when you're at your worst. If you can be better in your worst days than most people are at their best, you can truly be unstoppable.

I want you to get out there and accomplish wonders. By all means, have a good time, see your family, but give yourself permission to get some work done in the next few weeks. The best new year's resolution I can think of is "I will keep doing exactly what I have been doing for the past 365 days".

🔗 Progress Update

Pages, Onboarding Flows, and Offers

This week, I focused on the landing page. Mostly narrowing down on the messaging and copy.

I also figured out that my current onboarding sucks. People join, and have no idea what to do to get started. I’ve started building out an onboarding flow to make things a bit clearer.

I am also figuring out that WordRobin currently only tackles the very end of the writing process. I only ever use WordRobin when I’ve finished writing a complete first draft, and want to start editing.

I will have to figure out ways to make the starting steps easier, while staying true to WordRobin’s values - helping you create valuable content without losing your voice.

What’s Next?

Right now I’m adding in some new functionality to make the start of any new workstream less painful - I want people to go from Idea to first draft quickly, without relying on AI to write for them. Tricky problem to solve!

That’s all for now!

Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward to a pal. It only takes 18 seconds. Making this one took 3.5 hours.

Ben | X