Why the wish feels like the work

Before taking the habit apart, it's worth being fair to it, because it isn't stupid and it isn't laziness. Making the wish meets real needs, and if the book pretended otherwise you'd be right to put it down.

The wish gives you a clean start. The year has an edge on it, and stepping over the edge lets you put last year's version of yourself on the other side. Chapter 3 is about why this feels so real and what it can and can't do. The wish gives you a picture, and the picture is pleasant to look at. Sitting with the image of yourself at the end of the run, or with the book done, or with the debt gone, is one of the nicer things a mind can do on a grey afternoon. Chapter 5 is about what the picture costs.

The wish gives you a sense of control at a time of year when there's not much else to feel in control of. It's dark, it's cold, the money's gone on December, and a decision about the future is a thing you can make from the sofa. The wish also gives you something to say. People ask, and having an answer, a good one, a large one, is its own small pleasure. And the wish gives you hope, which after a hard year is not nothing. It's the reason, chapter 8 will argue, that people set the wish again after it failed, and the reason it fails the same way.

Underneath all of those is one belief, and it's the one the book is going to examine. The belief is that deciding is the hard part, and that having really decided, the doing will follow. It feels true because deciding is where the feeling is. The doing, on a Tuesday, has no feeling in it at all. It's just a pair of trainers by the door and no wish to put them on.

I'm not going to argue that any of these needs is false. The clean start is real, the picture is lovely, the hope is worth having. What I'm going to argue is that none of them is a plan, and that treating them as one is what puts you back at the first of January each year with the same wish and a smaller heart for it. The needs can be met. They just can't be met by the wish alone.