New Year’s Resolutions Work. Let’s Make Some.

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My new ChatGPT course is live! I’m very proud of it and I think it’ll make a dent in your life. See the end of this article for a special launch promo.

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New Year’s resolutions are a tradition with a bit of a bad rep. Sure, most resolutions will fail. Almost all attempts at making change in your life will ultimately fail. You exercise for a while, your enthusiasm fades, your workout sessions taper off, and before long you’re back where you were. You revert to our old ways – and you may find yourself demoralized and ashamed to boot.

Of course, if you keep trying, you will eventually break through. This is a certainty. Every major change I’ve made in my life was preceded by a string of failures. I tried to clean up my diet dozens of times before the change held.

Certain moments, though, give you better odds of creating change that sticks. When you get a clean slate in your life, a reset, it’s a bit easier to change your ways and keep it going. For example, when you move or start a new job or begin a new relationship.

Every year we get a new clean slate at the start of the year. And the changes we make at times like this are a little more likely to stick because we feel less weighed down by our past.

Change is hard and it mostly doesn’t work (unless you never stop trying). But the start of a new year provides an unusually good opportunity to pull it off.

Convinced? Alright, let’s make some resolutions!

Step 1: Give this year a theme

Your theme is your mission for the year, it’s the adventure you’re about to embark on.

For me, 2024 is My Best Year Ever. The main focus is my business. I worked all of 2023 creating the groundwork to build a proper business and livelihood. I’ve now got a superb product, a strong market, and loads of ideas and tactics for marketing and sales. I intend to rock the shit out of this year.

In 2023, I created 2X growth in this business in just six months of focus. This year I want 10X.

This could be your year of simplicity, creativity, giving, health, balance, or any realm you want to improve. (Not every resolution needs to fit the theme, but the most important ones should.) Your theme is what will give your resolutions meaning and purpose.

Step 2: Make some resolutions (not too many)

Now make some resolutions! Reflect on the year past. What went well and what didn’t? What are the areas of your life where you’d like to see improvement? What are some exciting and somewhat risky goals you can make?

Remember: a resolution is an activity, not a goal. My 10X business goal for this year is not a resolution. The resolutions are what will help me achieve that goal. “Lose 10 pounds” is a goal. “No snacking after 7pm” is a resolution.

How many should you make? Certainly no more than ten. If you want to keep things simple, three is always a good number. And if you’ve just got a single thing on your mind, one is just great.

I’ve made a few resolutions for my business and a few for my personal life.

Step 3: Write 'em down and put 'em everywhere

Write down the theme for the year and your resolutions and read them every day. Stick post-it notes everywhere, make them a daily item on your to-do list, write them down each day in your journal, whatever. Occasionally relocate them to someplace fresh.

Celebrate the little wins along the way. Get support from friends and family and be your own biggest cheerleader.

2024 is the year to start using AI

Conveniently enough, I have a recommendation for what one of those resolutions should be. This is the year to learn ChatGPT and AI. You should integrate AI into your work life this year, especially if creating content is part — or all — of your job.

And guess who should teach you? Yep, yours truly!

Learning ChatGPT can do any or all of these:

• Raise your content creation game

• Help you get more done in the same time

• Allow you to work less

I achieved the first two of these while creating this course. The course is a bit better than it would have been without AI, and I created over 2 hours of high-quality content in just 2.5 months of part-time-ish work. Most excitingly, I released it on schedule, on Christmas day. Anybody who knows my history knows launching things on time has never exactly been my superpower.

After just the couple hours it takes to watch this course, plus your own practice, you will be good at working with ChatGPT. (For anyone thinking you can binge random YouTube videos and get the same result, sorry, you definitely won’t.)

Get Create Content with ChatGPT and AI 2024 now.

The regular price will be $199, but the launch price is just $149. And you can save an additional $25 by using this code at checkout: BESTYEAREVER

That code expires end-of-day this Friday (January 5th).

50 free book summaries on Blinkist

I have a playlist of 50 awesome book summaries on Blinkist, and they’re totally free. They’re mostly about personal improvement, productivity, creativity, and business. Complete list below.

The Female Brain - Louann Brizendine

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman

Expert Secrets - Russell Brunson

Traffic Secrets - Russell Brunson

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding - Al Ries and Laura Ries

Design for How People Learn - Julie Dirksen

How We Learn - Benedict Carey

Testing Business Ideas - David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder

Daring Greatly - Brené Brown

Burn the Boats - Matt Higgins

From Strength to Strength - Arthur C. Brooks

Hyperfocus - Chris Bailey

ReWork - Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

$100M Offers - Alex Hormozi

Focus - Daniel Goleman

Life in Five Senses - Gretchen Rubin

How Minds Change- David McRaney

Discipline Is Destiny - Ryan Holiday

Think Again - Adam Grant

Chatter - Ethan Kross

Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson

Messy - Tim Harford

Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows

Nonviolent Communication - Marshall B. Rosenberg

Mindfulness - Mark Williams and Danny Penman

Wherever You Go, There You Are - Jon Kabat-Zinn

Full Catastrophe Living - Jon Kabat-Zinn

Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Building a Second Brain - Tiago Forte

The Willpower Instinct - Kelly McGonigal

Indistractable - Nir Eyal

How to Grow Your Small Business - Donald Miller

Atomic Habits - James Clear

The Male Brain - Louann Brizendine

How to Raise a Wild Child - Scott D. Sampson

The Myth of Normal - Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

The Extended Mind - Annie Murphy Paul

Effortless - Greg McKeown

How to Begin - Michael Bungay Stanier

Building a StoryBrand - Donald Miller

Late Bloomers - Rich Karlgaard

Ultralearning - Scott H. Young

The 1-Page Marketing Plan - Allan Dib

Life Is in the Transitions - Bruce Feiler

This Is Marketing - Seth Godin

Hooked - Nir Eyal

Hacking Growth - Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown

Make Time - Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

Build - Tony Fadell

Exactly What to Say - Phil M Jones

Get our free guide, Finish It Now

You have that one project, right? The one that haunts you, the one you believe could be really good. But life's responsibilities keep getting in the way, and it's been sitting on your hard drive for… too long.

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New guide to writing with ChatGPT

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How to stop starting

Your brain wants you to go for it. But maybe… don’t.

Ready for launch? Hold up.

I have a problem with starting. I don’t mean that I can’t get started. I mean starting too quickly and starting too much. This can produce small problems like buying software or gadgets I barely use. Or it can produce big problems like unfinished projects or worst of all, projects that are way more crazy-making than they should have been. 

And you’ve got the same problem. Why do I know this? Because what I’m talking about is a human bias called the action bias. The purpose of the brain isn’t just to think thoughts. Its purpose is to make things happen. Your brain wants you to do it: set that goal, buy that course, start that project. But it’s not so good at helping you achieve that goal, learn that material, or finish that project. 

The action bias tricks you into thinking you’re getting something done. But all you’ve really done is begin… and that’s the easy part. Impulsive choices like these will waste your time and resources. If you fall prey to the action bias frequently enough, and you’ll find yourself demoralized and doubting you can achieve much of anything.

I got burnt by the action bias in an unusually epic way. In 2012, I was finishing the original Everything is a Remix series, which was a big success. I was hot and I wanted to capitalize. I wanted to launch something and I wanted to do it fast. I launched a KickStarter for a new series, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. I had almost no clue what it was or what I was going to deliver or how long it would take or how much it would all cost . (How many successful KickStarters have ultimately cost the creator money? I’m guessing plenty.)

This is Not a Conspiracy Theory worked out. I made the thing I wanted to make, I got to the place I wanted to go. But it took eight years and the process was far more painful than it needed to be. The premature launch took a slow project and made it even slower because I wasted time wracking my brains trying to solve problems that couldn’t be solved. If I’d slowed down and thought things through a bit more, I could have saved myself substantial time and a lot of misery.

It often requires more energy and more discipline to not act. To wait, think things through and then act is actually harder. It’s way easier to just let it rip and make something—anything—happen. 

By slowing down, making sure we want to make the move we’re making and figuring out how to do it the best way we know how, we’re setting the stage for a more efficient and less painful project.

However, this problem is a shadow of what it once was for me. The big thing that has helped has been awareness. My snap decisions bounced back badly enough times that I got wise. I didn’t know anything about the action bias, I just learned through mistakes.

I learned to be slow down on big decisions first. But small decisions matter too, they add up. Something I’ve been doing in recent years is creating these little holds for these impulses. Want to buy something? I put it in a hold list and revisit again when my mood is more moderate. Then I revisit it again when I think. Still want it? Okay, it’s safe to purchase. Most things I want to buy do not make it through this gauntlet.

The practice of mindfulness helps with this, as well as countless other personal issues. 

But the action bias is one of those things that you never banish. It’ll always come with inventive new ways to trick you. But I’ve got decent defense now.