They say the tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions began some 4,000 years ago with the ancient Babylonians. Praying and making promises to their gods, right around spring.
There are all sorts of resolutions- getting fitter, being a better person, travelling more, reading, writing, picking up the Guitar, and so on.
For people interested in behaviour, understanding resolutions is a goldmine of insights.
Why?
There is goal setting, there is intention getting built, there is a drive towards habit formation, there is a need towards habit quitting, there is curiosity towards new skills – and often, a failure to convert any of that into sustained action.
There is enough data that talks about the fact that people fail.
40% of US adults set resolutions every year.
50% expect to fail before January ends.
25% will quit within the first week.
64% will quit after the first month.
10% will eventually ‘succeed’.
Research done in 2019 by Strava has shown that people quit their resolutions for the year by the second Friday of January. They started calling it Quitters Day, probably to motivate folks to continue their goals and yes, they should have chosen a better name.
When we go deeper into this line of questioning, we start getting fewer, and fewer answers –
Why do people fail?
Motivation Drops, they have less ability, and the prompting starts failing! said the beSci professional. True.
Why couldn’t they form a habit?
“I guess the 21-day rule is wrong, maybe the 90-day rule is right” said a respondent.
Maybe.
The what, when, why and how of failures were difficult to find, the keys to success had been undefined. Especially, in the Indian Context.
This had the team at 1001 Stories intrigued over the years. Many multi-modal studies were thus conducted, with respondents from varied backgrounds, and age groups, deploying deep-context studies, longitudinal observations, surveys and Interval tracking – to find some fundamental truths.
In this report, we cover:
1. Why you are going to fail, again.
2. The principles that work.
3. How Indian Traditions have made use of these principles.
4. What kind of perspective shift, and mental model is needed to succeed.
Presenting in a BiteGesit format-
Why did your New Year’s Resolution Fail and How to Succeed Next Year.
