"I failed, so it's me"

The last belief is the one the rerun is built on, and it's the most damaging because it feels like humility. The wish failed, so the problem is you. You lack discipline. You're not a finisher. Other people can do this and you, for some reason of character, can't.

Polivy and Herman's description of the false hope cycle, from chapter 8, includes what people do with the failure. They interpret it in a way that lets them try again the same way. The interpretation "it's me" does exactly that. If the problem was a lack of willpower, then the answer is more willpower, and the way to get more willpower is to want it more, and wanting it more is the picture, and the picture is what chapter 5 showed sapping the effort. The verdict on yourself protects the wish from any change. It sends you back to the first of January with the same wish and the instruction to try harder, which is the one instruction that has failed every year so far.

Look at the evidence from this book instead. Norcross found that success wasn't predicted by how much people wanted to change but by whether they believed they could do the specific thing and had the skills. Milne found that motivation, raised on purpose, didn't change behaviour, and a plan did. Oettingen found that the people who enjoyed the picture most did least. Lally found that habits take weeks longer than a fortnight to settle and survive a missed day. None of these findings has a place in it for a type of person who can't. All of them have a place for a plan that wasn't made.

So the honest reading of the drop is not "it's me". It's "I set an outcome, enjoyed the picture, ran on holiday conditions for two weeks, met the first real Tuesday with no sentence written for it, missed once, read the miss as a verdict, and stopped". That's a long sentence and every clause of it is about the plan. Change the plan and the person who couldn't turns out to be a person who hadn't been told what to do at ten to eight.

This is the change in understanding the book most wants you to have. The rerun isn't proof that you can't. It's proof that the wish, set the same way each year, produces the same February. And a wish is the one thing in the whole cycle that's entirely in your hands to set differently.