"I just need to want it enough"

The most natural thing to do with a wish is to dwell on it. You picture yourself at the end. Fit, lighter, fluent, the book on a shelf. It feels motivating, and the feeling is the reason people believe that the trouble in previous years was not wanting it enough. If they could only want it as much on the twentieth as they did on the first, they'd get there.

Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer tested this in four studies published in 2002, and the result runs the other way. They separated two ways of thinking about the future. One is expectation, which is judging that a desired outcome is likely. The other is fantasy, which is enjoying the images and thoughts of the outcome. They measured both in graduates looking for a job, in students with a crush on someone, in undergraduates facing an exam, and in patients recovering from hip replacement, and then measured effort and results weeks or months later, up to two years. Positive expectations predicted more effort and better results. Positive fantasies predicted less effort and worse results. The people who'd enjoyed the picture most did least.

The authors' interpretation, which I share, is that a vivid picture of the outcome gives you some of the outcome's reward now, and that a reward you've already had is a weaker reason to work. The study can't say the picture causes the drop, because people weren't assigned to fantasise. But it's a longitudinal finding across four different kinds of people and it points one way.

That is the January problem in one sentence. The wish is enjoyable precisely because it lets you have the picture, and the picture is what's sapping the Tuesday. On the first of January the pleasure of imagining the run is high and the cost of running is zero because you're on the sofa. On a wet Tuesday in February the pleasure of the image has been spent, several times over, and the cost of running is a cold half hour.

So wanting it more is not the answer, and trying to want it more, by picturing it harder, is likely the opposite of the answer. What Oettingen and Mayer's expectations group had was something plainer. They thought the thing was likely, which means they could see the steps. The next chapter is about why seeing the steps is a different act from wanting the end.