In Defense Of Adding Fine Print To One's Personal Goals

Round number bias is a good servant, but a bad master.

Suppose that both Alice and Bob haven’t been cooking at home as much as they could lately, which they recognize isn’t optimal for their health or their wallets. And so they both resolve to cook more in the upcoming year.

Alice’s New Year’s resolution sounds like this:

This year, I will not order food delivery or eat out. That is, unless I’m going out with friends or on a date. I can also visit a coffeeshop once a week, or at any time during my birthday month. Oh, and the McDonald’s drive-thru is also fine.

While Bob’s sounds like this:

This year, I will not order food delivery.

Notice two things about these resolutions:

1. If you look at them separately, Bob’s resolution seems nice and elegant, while Alice’s seems really convoluted and weaselly. So many exemptions and stipulations, did a lawyer draft this? Come on Alice, is your heart in it or what?

2. But when you actually compare them side by side, it becomes apparent that following Alice’s resolution to the letter is actually more challenging!

…huh! 🤔

---

There is much to be said for Bob’s resolution. It is easier to remember, keep track of, and describe to others (and therefore brag about, which is a source of motivation for some). It is also, I assume, more habit-forming and it may just be more satisfying vibes-wise. Elegance is good!¹

But at the end of the day, Alice and Bob aren’t doing arbitrary challenges for entertainment. Their goals are meant to have a positive, measurable impact on their lives. And Alice’s impact (if she succeeds) will almost surely be greater!²

Does said greater impact outweigh the downsides of inelegance? Not necessarily. I sympathize a lot with people who balk at this kind of complexity. Mental effort is not a trivial cost, and it might not be worth it in all cases.

But at the very least, it would be unwise for Alice to let her contract-like resolution make her feel like a dirty slacker looking for excuses to cut corners. Her self-image as an ambitious or committed person should be based on, if anything, the difficulty of her personal goals, not their elegance. It’s not her fault that her specific choice of difficulty is not easy to put into short sentences and round numbers!

Obviously this style of resolution wouldn’t work for all personal goals; but for some, it is at least worth considering. Maybe you want to do more knitting, but you feel that resolving to produce one sock per week would be too easy, while two per week would be too difficult. In that case, why not come up with some complicated point system where you end up with 1.4 socks per week on average? Try it!

---

I started Soup of the Night in April of 2024. I am quite satisfied with it; Normalize Mediocre Parenting generated a lot of good discussion on Reddit, while writing my Borges review was a herculean effort (by my standards) whose result I’m very proud of.

Still, the blog so far consists of 11 posts, including a short introduction, two recycled posts, and this one. That’s a fairly modest amount of writing (and not for a lack of ideas, I assure you!). I’m hoping to do more in 2025, or at least to keep up with this year’s pace.

So to test my own advice in action, I am making an inelegant, lawyer-y New Year’s resolution for this blog, with lots of fine print:

1. I resolve to publish twelve new posts before the end of 2025.

2. A post needs to be at least 700 words to count.

3. All posts that were finished in 2025 count, even if they were started earlier. (This does not include posts that were fully finished, even if I make minor edits to them.)

4. To encourage a more consistent posting schedule, I will try to post once a month. If I miss a month, the number of required posts will increase by one.

5. Longer posts (3000+ words) will count as two, while very long ones (10,000+ words) will count as three.

6. If I undergo a huge, unexpected life change (e.g. I get married, move to a different city or get hospitalized long-term) then that reduces the number of posts by three.

7. You know what? Just to make it uncomfortably inelegant: the number of posts is actually thirteen, and one of them can be 376+ words.

Ugh, what a clumsy resolution! But maybe that’s for the best.

Thanks for reading Soup of the Night. I wish you a happy new year, and I’ll see you again in 2025!

1. Elegance is the reason why people even do New Year’s resolutions in the first place (as opposed to doing resolutions in cycles of, say, 11 months and 4 days). That said, cf. CGP Grey’s recommendation to do seasonal resolutions instead.

2. Also: another downside to the simplicity of Bob’s resolution is that it might make it easy for him to rationalize post hoc excuses as unforeseen exceptional circumstances (“I didn’t get that job offer I wanted, and also it’s my birthday week, so I deserve a treat!”); whereas Alice knows too well that that level of exceptionality is already accounted for in her original contract, so the resolution must apply as usual. Cf. Bryan Caplan’s distinction between “Catholic” and “Protestant” approaches to ethics (mock quotes because it’s based on religious stereotypes rather than official theological positions; the former just means “very strict standards enforced loosely” while the latter is “moderate standards enforced strictly”).