Give Yourself the Grace to (Re)Start Your New Year’s Resolutions

How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along?

Today is Quitter’s Day 2025. It’s the day when a shocking 80% or more people who made New Year’s resolutions have tapped out. These are the same folks who made decisions so fervently at midnight on 1 January.

I’m one of those folks who always uses a new year (or month or week or day) to reset myself and my habits. Because that’s what resolutions really are, habits. Some of these habits have become embedded in my internal hard drive. I no longer need to keep track of my daily flossing because, years ago, I created the habit. Ditto for my daily readings. This year, I’m reading The Daily Pressfield and Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic Page-a-Day calendar.

Some habits are easier for me than others. I’ve not picked up my guitar every day, but I’ve done it most days.

The other habit that I wanted to get back on the menu was writing. My writing goal was simple: restart a project I set aside and move it forward. The longer goal is to complete the novel in Q1.

Here’s the challenge: I haven’t been in a regular writing routine for a little while now. My fingers were out of practice. My imagination muscle might have atrophied. When I’m really in the zone, I can knock out 1,500 to 2,000 in a session.

But with so much time elapsed since I last had a regular writing schedule, I made a choice: give myself grace.

Translation: I knew I could not begin New Year’s Day with 1,000 words. If I had set that word count as my benchmark, I would have failed. And that failure would have discouraged me. The challenge to get back in the swing of things would have been more difficult.

So I told myself to simply start writing on New Year’s Day. I did. A whopping 189 words. Shrug. I had started. The next day was 459 while January 3 was 714. I topped 1,000 words on 4 January…but fell under that mark the following day.

The shocker was this past Monday: barely 298 words. I thought I was on a roll! What the heck? Then I remembered a theme for the early part of January: grace. Yes, 298 was under what I thought I should be able to do–and it was–but I was also 298 words closer to the end. More importantly, closer to knowing what kind of story this novel is going to be.

So if you gave yourself a new resolution–a new habit–to start this year and you’ve struggled, give yourself the grace to stumble.

Then start again. Seriously, it’s that simple. Just restart.

Life is going to throw you curveballs. That’s just life. You know you want to create that new resolution, that new habit. I’m here to tell you that it’s never too late.

But if you want to start that habit of writing, of calling your friends and family you haven’t spoken to in years, of learning a new language, or learning a new skill, of exercising to get yourself healthier, the do the simplest thing possible.

Start.