5 Alternative New Year’s Resolutions

If you dislike traditional New Year’s resolutions but still want to be thoughtful about making the best of the new year, I have five alternative New Year’s resolutions for you.

1. Word of the Year

You’ve probably heard of this one but maybe dismissed it as too simplistic or superficial. That’s what I did when I first heard about someone picking a word of the year. But having done this several times now, I’m confident that the simplicity is what makes this so powerful.

Word of the year means you think about a goal, aspiration, or value that you want to be especially focused on in the new year then select one word that best encapsulates it.

For example, in 2025 my word of the year was ambition. I didn’t commit or resolve to do anything specifically ambitious that year—lose 40 pounds, run a marathon, start a business, etc. Instead, I resolved to use the word ambition as a kind of mantra or reminder that I wanted to put specific importance on my value of ambition this year. The result was that I was thinking about ambition a lot more and frequently found myself asking questions like:

What would this project look like if I was 10% more ambitious with it?
What would it mean to be more ambitious as a friend?
What’s the difference between good and bad ambition?
Why am I not as ambitious as I would like to be?
Could low ambition in this era be hurting me?

So, by choosing ambition as my word of the year, I ended up reflecting a lot more on ambition and the role it plays in my life and coming to a deeper understanding of myself and my goals and values. All without the guilt and frustration that often accompanies traditional New Year’s Resolutions.

But as a side effect, I think choosing ambition as my word of the year resulted in me actually being more ambitious. Not only did we follow through on our plan to move from New Mexico to Oregon—quite the undertaking especially with four young kids—but I also ended up writing a proposal for a book, signing a publishing deal, and am about halfway through writing the first draft. And while it’s possible both of those things would have happened without my having chosen ambition as my word of the year, it’s also possible that they wouldn’t.

So, if you like the idea of word of the year, brainstorm a handful of values that are especially meaningful to you and ask which of them you might want to pay special attention to in the year to come.

If it helps, here are a few word of the year I’ve come across from other people over the years:

Focus
Presence
Spirit
No
Yes
Slow
Complaining
Courage

2. New Year’s Experiments

One of the things that makes traditional New Year’s resolutions difficult is that they often inspire a dichotomous pass/fail mindset. If you resolved to work out five days a week next year, but miss a day or two in your first week, you already feel like a failure.

But what if you framed the New Year less in terms of what you want to accomplish and more in terms of how you want to grow or what you want to learn?

I like the idea of a New Year’s Experiment because it tends to inspire a growth/learn mindset rather than a succeed/fail one.

Here’s how you could do it:

Pick six New Year’s goals—things you want to do, try, learn about, grow into, etc.
Assign each of these to one of the first six months of the year. January is watercolor painting, February is hot yoga, March is memorizing poetry, etc.
Commit to experimenting with each of those activities through the month it’s assigned to. Think of this as a light commitment where the goal is not to accomplish something so much as learn about the activity and test how much it resonates with you.
At the end of June, pick the activity you enjoyed the most, or found most appealing, and make that your resolution for the back half of the year.

3. Anti-Resolutions

This is one of those it’s-just-crazy-enough-to-work ideas.

An anti-resolution is a commitment to not work on a particular goal or accomplishment for at least a year.

It’s about giving yourself permission to let go of the insistence on accomplishing something, as well as all the guilt and frustration that comes with not accomplishing it.

The logic here is not that you should simply give up; it’s that sequencing matters.

Let me give you an example of what I mean:

Brittany has had four perpetual New Year’s resolutions that she constantly tries to accomplish but never does: Cleaning out and organizing her garage, losing 20 pounds, getting back into running, and learning to play piano.
Each year, she picks one or two of them as resolutions, makes a little progress before falling off the wagon by late February, spends the Spring feeling bad about herself, switches to a different one of the four for the summer, makes a bit of progress before failing again, then swears of New Year’s resolutions forever, until January 1st rolls around and she decided to give them another shot.
Instead, I might encourage her to make piano, cleaning the garage, and losing 20 pounds into anti-resolutions that she gives herself full permission not to work on at all for at least a year. Now, instead of feeling guilty every time she walks through the garage or past her dust-gathering piano, she takes a rain check and refocuses that energy on ONE of her goals, in this case getting back into running.
Ideally, she takes some inspiration from the New Year’s experiment idea and treats getting back into running less as a goal she needs to succeed at and more as an activity she’s experimenting with in order to discover the best version of it for her.
At this point, I’d say her odds of making progress on this one goal are much higher—both because she’s framing it as an experiment and because she’s not constantly beating herself up for the other things she’s not doing.
Finally—and this is key—if she does get back into running in some capacity, I would bet that she feels more motivated and confident taking on one of the other three goals next year and making good progress there as well.

Anti-resolutions are about giving yourself permission to say no to most things so you can put more energy into making real progress in one thing.

4. Person of the Year

This one’s basically Word of the Year but instead of choosing a value to be especially mindful of for the year you choose a person. Specifically, I’d frame it like this:

Person of the Year means choosing a specific person in your life you’d like to invest more into.

Spouses and kids are a natural fit for Person of the Year. But parents, nieces and nephews, friends, even co-workers can all make for good choices here. The only restriction is it can’t be yourself.

Importantly, don’t start off with a bunch of goals and activities—things you’re going to do. Instead, just commit to having this person top of mind throughout your days and trust that by being more mindful of them and your relationships, you will organically find ways to invest in them and the relationship in meaningful and impactful ways.

5. The 10X Resolution

I realize this will be an unpopular option for most of you, but for the right person it will be a huge unlock.

The basic idea behind the 10X Resolution is to take a traditional New Year’s resolution and make it much more ambitious.

For example:

Go to gym 3x per week. → Run an ultramarathon by the end of this year.
Take piano lessons → Write, perform, and publish an original piano sonata by Christmas.
Declutter storage unit. → Design and build a storage shed in the backyard from scratch myself.

The logic here is that even though increasing the size of a resolution will also increase the difficulty (and therefore, for most people, make it less likely they’ll even get started, much less follow through), it also has the potential to increases the value or meaningfulness of the resolution which, depending on the person, can increase their motivation to a much higher level and actually increase the likelihood of sticking with it.

Final Thought

Most people rely purely on the outcome to generate New Year’s resolution, but you’ll tap into a lot more intrinsic motivation if you consider the process as well and choose something that you enjoy and find meaningful regardless of how the outcome turns out.