"I'll do it properly or not at all"

Wishes are large by nature, and part of the appeal is the size. Not "walk more" but "run a half marathon". Not "write on Tuesdays" but "finish the novel". The size feels like seriousness. A small goal feels like you don't mean it.

Janet Polivy and Peter Herman wrote in 2002 about what they called the false hope syndrome, and their description of it fits the January habit closely enough that it's worth quoting the shape. People make repeated attempts at self-change despite repeated failure. The attempts are marked by unrealistic expectations about how fast the change will come, how much will change, how easy it'll be, and what it'll do for the rest of their life. When the attempt fails, they interpret the failure in a way that leads them to try again the same way. Polivy and Herman's paper is a review of their own and others' evidence, and the pattern they describe is drawn mostly from dieting, but it's the resolution cycle in four sentences. Too fast, too much, too easy, and the failure explained in a way that protects the wish.

The size of the wish is doing something specific here. A large wish is a large picture, and chapter 5 explained what a large picture does. It also sets the least version out of reach. If the wish is a half marathon, then a fifteen-minute jog after a bad day feels like a failure rather than a success, so you don't do the jog. You do nothing, because nothing is at least honest. That's how "properly or not at all" ends in "not at all". It isn't that you lack commitment. It's that the wish has defined every possible Tuesday action as not proper.

The honest objection is that small goals produce small results, and that if you only ever do the least version you'll never run the half marathon. That's true, and chapter 18 has a place for the large version. But the large version is a thing you build up to from a floor that survives Tuesdays, and the size of the wish decides where the floor is. Put the wish at half marathon and the floor is somewhere you can't stand on a bad day. Put it at "run, for however long, on Tuesday and Saturday" and the floor is under your feet, and half marathons are what happen to people who keep standing on it.

Seriousness isn't size. Seriousness is a Tuesday you can point to.