"Big goals are motivating"

You may have read that ambitious goals get more out of people than modest ones, and that's a fair summary of a real body of research. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarised thirty-five years of work on goal-setting theory in 2002, and the core finding of that work is that specific, difficult goals lead to higher performance than vague ones or easy ones, given commitment, feedback and the ability to do the task. So why wouldn't a big January goal be the right kind of goal?

Because of what a goal is in that research and what it is on your list. The goals in Locke and Latham's studies are targets for tasks people already know how to do. Make more calls. Cut more trees. Solve more problems. The difficulty is in the amount, and the how is settled. The wish on your list is a different animal. "Learn Spanish" isn't a hard target for a known task. It's a name for a hundred tasks you haven't chosen yet. The theory's own conditions, which are commitment, feedback and ability, are precisely what the wish lacks. There's no feedback on "get fit" because there's nothing to measure on a Tuesday. There's no ability to apply because the task hasn't been named. This is my reading of the theory and not something Locke and Latham say about resolutions, but I think it holds.

So the finding doesn't argue against this book. It argues for the Tuesday sentence, which is a specific target for a known task. "Twenty minutes of Spanish on the app at the kitchen table at eight on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday" is exactly the sort of goal the theory says works, and "learn Spanish" is exactly the sort it says doesn't.

There's a second point in the same literature, and it's a caution. Locke and Latham note the theory's limits, and other researchers have written about the side effects of over-prescribing goals, which include narrowing attention and encouraging people to game the number. You can see a mild version in January. The person whose wish is a weight loss number weighs themselves daily and lets the number set their mood, which is a habit with its own book in this series. The number becomes the goal and the Tuesday, which is where the number comes from, gets ignored.

Big goals are motivating when they're targets. A wish isn't a target. It's a hope with a deadline of December, and December is a long way from a wet Tuesday.