2025 is over and 2026 has begun.

I’m not normally one for retrospectives. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life thinking about mistakes and miscalculations I’ve made, wasting thousands of hours of mental energy on endless rumination, marinating in regret. Certainly, there are things we can learn from the past. Failing to learn from the past dooms us to an endless cycle of repeated mistakes. But too much rumination is unhelpful, and I want to look forward.

That said, I’m also not normally one for New Years Resolutions. The concept of the New Years Resolution makes sense to me, in a way. After the debauchery and excess of the holiday season, promising to turn over a new leaf and live right makes a lot of sense. But as the child of an alcoholic, I tend not to believe hastily composed promises made in the light of the morning after. Such promises are just disappointments waiting to happen. The switch from one year to another changes nothing unless you’re willing to put in sustained effort and change the systems of your life, and most of us lack the time, energy, and materiel needed to effectively do that. We’re overworked, under-resourced, and trying to survive in a society that only values productivity and shareholder value, not human life. A resolution means nothing in such a world.

Since positive resolutions seem doomed, I’ve taken a different approach. My strategy for the New Years Resolution has generally been to resolve that in the coming year I will live a completely debauched lifestyle. I will be a wastrel, a scoundrel, a loafer, and a drunkard. I will make empty promises, carouse, consume to excess, and generally live a wildly inappropriate lifestyle. This resolution has two key features that make it make sense to me.

First: it’s easily achieved. It’s super easy to live a lifestyle of reckless abandon. Get baked and start drinking first thing in the morning. Spend recklessly and accumulate irresponsible amounts of debt. Take the easy path. Lie, cheat, and steal. Lean in to hedonism. I personally know a lot of people who have lived this kind of lifestyle, and while the inevitable consequences are pretty intense, the lifestyle itself is easy to achieve.

Second: by resolving to live this kind of lifestyle, you immediately doom yourself to fail at it. Resolutions fail. Failing to live a completely reckless, debauch, and irresponsible lifestyle means that you’re probably living a more normal, well-adjusted life. By planning to fail at this resolution, you lay the groundwork to live a responsible, balanced, and generally acceptable lifestyle, maybe occasionally dipping your toes into the dark waters of the wild life but not plunging in.

A New Approach

This year, though, I’m going to try something different. Instead of making targeted and doomed resolutions, I’m going to lie to myself until I believe my own bullshit.

I learned this trick in my distance running club. Distance running is hard. The physical exertion, of course, is quite difficult. But the mental energy that is required to convince yourself to keep going, mile after mile, is something else altogether. It’s easy to quit after a few miles. It’s easy to talk yourself out of it, to believe that inner voice that says “I can’t do this” or “This sucks.” The key to success, I’ve learned, is to lie to yourself.

What does this look like? Obviously, you have to select an appropriate lie. The precise dosage of bullshit is super important here. You can’t tell too big of a lie: telling yourself “I’m going to set a world record in the 10k” is not likely to work for a whole bunch of reasons. But telling yourself “I can do this, this is easy!” is a much more approachable lie.

I’ve tried this strategy with solid results. When I begin to feel tired, I begin chanting “easy, effortless” in my head, in cadence with my breathing. Breathe in two steps; “Easy!” Breathe out two steps, “Effortless!” Repeat this chant for mile after mile, and eventually, it does become easy and effortless. The pain and exhaustion are still there, but by choosing to believe that you’re actually quite capable of doing the thing, and that it’s easy and effortless, it turns out that you actually can do the thing. Ever since I started lying to myself, I’ve been setting personal records and improving my performance consistently. The system seems to work.

My New Years Lies

With that in mind, I’ve decided to take a similar approach to 2026. Instead of making doomed resolutions – I’m going to lose 20 pounds, I’m going to learn Ruby, I’m going to get organized – I’m going to just lie to myself in a systematic way until the lies manifest as actions. Just like saying “easy, effortless” while running, saying a few simple phrases to myself every day will help me go the distance.

I’ve built a few simple lies to help me improve myself in specific ways:

• “I am healthy and strong.” By telling myself this lie every day, I prime myself to make healthier choices.
• “I am thoughtful and rational.” This lie will help me think more clearly by priming me to have a calmer mind.
• “I am sensitive and emotionally intelligent.” This lie will help me be a better husband and father. Like every other American man, I am emotionally broken by our society, and by telling myself this lie I will allow myself to feel feelings again.
• “I am competent and hardworking.” This lie will help me perform better at work by priming me to slow down and work with purpose versus working for speed.

Furthermore, these lies are structured using the “I am” phraseology, not the “I will” or “I want to” phraseology. By saying that you will or that you want to do something, you’re selling yourself short. “I will” is vague and empty. “I want to” is an expression of desire, not an expression of state or intention. “I am” is powerful. “I am” implies a contemporaneous state of being in a specific way. By saying these things in this way, you can trick yourself into behaving in ways that manifest these specific states of being.

Does this strategy work? I’ve never tried it in such a broad or systematic way before, but my trials with running suggest to me that it does work. I can count dozens of times when I wanted to give up on a run, but by telling myself “easy, effortless” as I chug along, I’ve powered myself across the finish line. I have reason to believe that this strategy will work, and even if it doesn’t work, changing my inner monologue to be affirming instead of negative seems like a good idea. So instead of making doomed resolutions to start 2026, come with me on a journey of positive self-deception and see where it takes us. A bright, fulfilling future powered by radical self-deception awaits.