My Comprehensive Blueprint to Conclude 2023 on A Phenomenal Note
Build massive rut-free momentum going into 2024 - to crush your New-Year goals and resolutions
Self-sabotage got me in a chokehold.
Blitz-chess procrastination. Surfing celebrity-gossip. Near-daily NoFap relapses. Nagging existential doubt — and an unexpected breakup to worsen it all.
This wasn’t my 2023 Q4 “gameplan” — but as Mike Tyson quipped, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
The question is whether you counter-punch or reel in defeat.
- My lizard brain hisses, “2023 is almost drawing to an end. Why bother now? Mess up to the max. We‘ll start afresh in 2024.”
- But the rational cortex whispers, “These are our last few weeks to build all-out momentum before 2024 starts!”
Hearing variants of the same voices? We both know which is right.
This idea of “messing up to the max” and “resetting” the next day, week, or year is insidious.
If your knee is broken, would you hammer it to a pulp before letting it recover?
The recovery will only be more painful and prolonged.
This is why the wave of fresh gym faces and writing voices vanish by Valentine’s — the New Year motivation balm barely heals the pulped knee.
A better way is to avoid pulping the knee — and zone in all effort to heal it…
So, it recovers enough by New Year's Eve to kick our 2024 goals into the skies.
But aggressively slathering Tiger Balm won’t work — the stinging pain will make you reach for the hammer again.
Instead, we need a strategic approach — a realistic blend of prioritization, intention-setting, environment design, systems, fall-backs, and accountability.
That’s precisely what this article is — a blueprint with practical steps, science-backed rationale, and illustrative examples/visuals…
A game plan for building, sustaining, and protecting massive momentum…
So, as 2024 rolls by, our New Year resolutions turn into New Year actualizations.
Let’s dive right in.
The Crucial (and Contrarian) First Step
Be it fixing problems or improving our lives, we default to adding stuff. As research psychologist Benjamin Converse says,
“Additive solutions have sort of a privileged status — they tend to come to mind quickly and easily. Subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider, but they take more effort to find.”
While adding might “work,” it clutters and overcomplicates our lives. 2 modern-day issues worsen this:
- A consumer culture with ads and marketing that prey on our insecurities.
- Self-help and fitness industries that peddle new habits, routines, and pills on the daily.
The result? Decision fatigue, scattered focus, and obsessive hoarding.
Building focused momentum demands subtraction— trimming our lives to the 3 core essentials. Why 3?