A new year is here, and with it comes everyone’s favorite list: New Year’s resolutions. My friends and I have a habit of looking through past years’ lists and laughing at our naively optimistic expectations. Looking through New Year’s resolutions offers insight into how people expect change to happen. As I grow older, and maybe wiser (I hope), I’ve gotten more skillful at making resolutions and more aware of the patterns that differentiate the ones that get checked off and the ones that end up as repeat offenders.
These types of resolutions are the ones that resurface year after year, taunting us from their position at the top of our lists, and yet, remain unfinished, or worse, we somehow end up further from where we started the year before. So what’s missing? Is there a method we can implement to finally gain the upper hand?
For me, the answer has a lot to do with how we think about change. I can’t count the number of times I’ve decided it was time for a rebrand after a sudden burst of energy. Deciding enough was enough and changing every bad habit in the book, downloading Pinterest pictures of my new life, and making new playlists to support me through the journey ahead. Unfortunately, these ambitious plans usually end up being less of a transformation and more of a one-week boot camp.
Motivation, willpower, and yes, even Pinterest boards can make a difference in shaping our goals. But the important part is making goals that are actually feasible — the weekly, even daily commitments we take on are where the real change manifests.
We can see this kind of commitment in Carrie Soto Is Back, my first read of the new year. The novel follows a professional tennis player who comes out of retirement in an attempt to reclaim her title as the best female tennis player in the world. While Carrie is a nuanced character who struggles in different areas of her life, the way she built her game reminded me of what it actually takes to master a discipline.
Carrie doesn’t practice endlessly for a few scattered weeks without direction. She shows up every day, refining a single shot at a time. Even something as small as adjusting the height of her jump requires studying fitness, analyzing her opponent, practicing in matches, and only then bringing it into professional play until it becomes instinctive. These small adjustments—studying, repetition, patience—eventually lead to fluency. But they take time.
Resolutions are really just habits we’re trying to develop. The key to accomplishing them isn’t becoming a new person overnight, but committing to becoming someone slightly better, again and again, over time. Accepting this, even though the method is taxing and a bit less pretty, has allowed me to improve and given me room to make mistakes from time to time.
As we go into 2026, I’m choosing to channel my inner Carrie Soto into the skills I’ve set out to develop this year. It may not be perfect or dramatic, but as long as the trajectory keeps moving upward, by 2030, those once-repeated resolutions will have added up to a winning set.
