> So you list all the things that the ideal version of yourself must have and a long list of things you must do. But to make any progress on your goal, you have

> So you list all the things that the ideal version of yourself must have and a long list of things you must do. But to make any progress on your goal, you have the cognitive load of keeping track of all the requirements you’ve put on yourself. I speculate that this is why many New Year’s resolutions fail; the abstraction for building your future self is weak. Or people just pop them off their stack willy-nilly because it’s a vague tradition to do so. Because most people who are old enough to be serious about a “New Year’s resolution” also are old enough to understand that if you really want to accomplish something or change something, it takes time and dedication and not just pinky-swearing at midnight over champagne. Also, not to nitpick, but the reason people make lists of things to get done is so that there is literally no cognitive load in keeping track of them. And it’s a weird pivot to go from people have a lot of things they think they want to accomplish to writers write and runners run (literally cases where people have only one thing they want to accomplish). The framing of this piece was so weird.