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Welcome to April. We are officially in the graveyard of Q1 ambitions.
By now, the “new beginnings” energy from January has fully evaporated. If you’re like me, you haven't just fallen behind on your New Year’s resolutions - you have fully left them on the back burner.
You probably feel terrible about it. You’re looking at your track record and thinking: I should be further along. I have no discipline. I couldn't stick to the plan.
I want you to take a deep breath and let yourself off the hook. You didn't fail. You just finished phase 1: data collection.
You treated your New Year's resolution like a binding legal contract, rather than what it actually was: a deeply uneducated guess.
We need to completely change how we look at goals, habits, and quitting. Because knowing when to abandon a plan isn't a weakness. It is a high-level skill.
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Let’s say on December 31st, you decided your goal for the year was to run a 12km race.
Two weeks into January, you made a profound discovery: you absolutely hate running. It hurts your knees, you find it mind-numbingly boring, and you dread waking up to do it. You thought it would make you healthier. Instead, it’s making you unhappy.
But you’ve convinced yourself that you have two options. You can either be the person who follows through and force yourself to suffer through the training. Or, you can quit exercising altogether and label yourself a failure.
You lock yourself into a plan made by a past version of you - a version who had significantly less data about your actual life than you do now.
But what if the smartest move here isn’t to force yourself to keep going? What if it’s to change your strategy? What if it’s to change the goal itself?
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Most New Year's resolutions are built on a hallucination.
We tell ourselves, "I want to be a morning person." We picture an aesthetic, peaceful morning with matcha and journaling. We imagine it as an “end state” - a permanent, static identity we can achieve and lock into place.
But human beings do not have end states. We are not robots; we are biological beings with changing bodies and brains.
What you are romanticizing is not a consistent state of being. It’s a single, frozen snapshot of a relentless, ongoing process.
You never “achieve” being a healthy person. You just wake up and make a healthy choice today. And then do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. When we idolize the outcome, the process feels like a punishment.
But the process is all there is.
You are not a finished product. You’re a highly adaptable, constantly shifting organism. And your habits need to breathe and shift right alongside you.
Changing your mind about something after you’ve tried it isn't “giving up”. It’s adapting. If the soup you're cooking tastes terrible, you don't force yourself to eat the whole pot. You change the recipe.
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So why do we find it so hard to adapt? To say “I don’t like running, so let me try swimming instead?”
Because pivoting means starting over. And we’ve forgotten what learning is supposed to feel like.
When we try to implement a new routine - whether that’s running every day, waking up earlier, or starting a side hustle - we expect it to look like the polished vlogs we see on Instagram. And when it’s inevitably messy, chaotic, and clunky, we panic. We look at the mess and say, “I have no idea what I’m doing. I must be incompetent.”
This leads to a kind of personal doomerism. If the solution isn't immediately perfect, we conclude that the problem is unfixable.
But not knowing what you’re doing is not incompetence. It’s just the starting point of trying something new.
We spend decades in school supposedly learning how to learn, yet as adults, we’re terrified of the beginner phase. We want the competence without the clumsiness. The insights without the aimless exploring. The clarity about who we are, without the chaos of finding out.
If your Q1 goals felt like a disaster, good. That means you were actually in the arena. You were doing the messy work of figuring out what doesn't fit.
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So, it’s April. Your original resolution is dead. What do you do now?
Most people do one of two things: they either beat themselves up, or they revert back to their comfortable, December 31st default and pretend the last three months never happened.
I want to offer a third option borrowed from the world of statistics: Bayesian updating.
In Bayesian probability, when you get new information, you don't throw the whole equation away, and you definitely don't go backwards. You take the new data, and you update your original priors to get a more accurate formula.
This also applies to how we build our lives.
Did you fail at waking up at 5 AM? Great. You now know your circadian rhythm hates 5 AM. Update the prior and try 7:30 AM instead.
Did you fail at going to the gym five days a week? Excellent. You now know that your current schedule can only sustain two days. Update your goal and aim for two good sessions a week.
Don't go back to the old you. But don't blindly push forward with a broken plan, either.
Take the data you gathered in Q1, drop the ego, and recalculate. The goal was never to be perfect by April. It's just to be a little more accurate tomorrow.
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Rooting for the adaptable you,
Hanna from Pulse
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