Why New Year's Resolutions Keep You Stuck (And What I Do Instead)

It's December 26th, which means you're probably in one of two places right now.

Either you're staring at the leftover pie wondering if you should "start fresh" on January 1st and just write off this week entirely...

Or you're already mentally drafting your 2025 goals. The revenue targets. The habits. The "this is the year I finally..." list that feels urgent and optimistic and vaguely familiar because you made a version of it last January too.

I have a strong opinion about this time of year and how to approach it. I don't set New Year's resolutions. Haven't for years.

Not because I'm above goal-setting. Not because I've achieved some zen state of not wanting things. But because I figured out that resolutions are a fundamentally broken system—and I found something that actually works.

Resolutions fail about 90% of the time, and we act like the problem is willpower. Like if we just wanted it badly enough, we'd stick to the plan.

But willpower isn't the issue.

Part of the issue is that goals create a pass/fail binary. You either hit the revenue number or you didn't. You either went to the gym four times a week or you failed. There's no room for life to happen—and life always happens.

But the deeper problem (and in my oh so humble opinion) is that goals tell you WHERE to go but not HOW to decide.

Every single day, you face dozens of micro-decisions. What to work on. What to say no to. Whether to take that call. Whether to invest in that thing. Whether to rest or push through.

A goal like "hit $50K months" doesn't help you make those decisions. It just sits there, judging you, while you try to figure out what the hell to actually do today.

I spent years setting goals as yearly resolutions and then feeling like a failure when I didn't hit them, even when I'd made massive progress. Even when I'd grown in ways I couldn't have predicted.

So I stopped. And I started doing something else.

Instead of resolutions, I set an annual theme.

One word or phrase that becomes a filter for every decision I make that year. Not a destination—a lens. Not something to achieve, but something to embody.

And I've discovered that the results of each theme don't just last for that year. They compound. They get baked into everything I do. Over time, each theme becomes integrated into the very fiber of how I navigate the world.

Let me show you what I mean.

Going into 2024, I was running a business with a partner, and honestly? At first, I loved how we operated. We moved fast. We shot from the hip. We got above-average results by winging it.

But I started to realize I wanted more.

I wanted to level up. Not just in revenue, but in impact. And that meant leveling up in our approach. More intention. More professionalism. We needed to build a foundation that could handle real scale and growth.

What got us to that level wasn't going to get us to the next one. Winging it had a ceiling that I wanted to break through.

My partner didn't see it that way. She genuinely preferred the spontaneity, the project-hopping, the "let's see what happens" energy. She had a vision for a collection of smaller projects. I had ambitious dreams of massive impact.

Neither was wrong. They were just incompatible.

So I chose "Craftsmanship" as my theme for the year.

Every decision ran through that filter. Does this reflect craftsmanship? Is this intentional? Am I building something I'm proud of, or am I just getting through the day?

By March, the partnership was over.

The theme didn't tell me to end the partnership. But it made the misalignment impossible to ignore.

And here's the thing. Craftsmanship is still compounding. It's still baked into everything I do. The intention, the care, the refusal to just "ship it and see," that didn't end when 2024 ended. It became part of how I operate.

Going into 2025, I was on my own and rebuilding. And I was moving fast. Maybe a little too fast.

My revenue had jumped from $10K months to $30K-$50K months in the second half of 2024. But I was also dropping balls. Missing details. Skipping steps that forced me to repeat work. I was so focused on speed that I was actually slowing myself down.

So I chose a phrase I'd heard in military contexts: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

The idea is that when you try to rush, you make mistakes. When you're methodical and deliberate, you actually move faster because you're not constantly fixing errors and backtracking.

This theme transformed how I approached everything.

My webinar funnel became an experiment in deliberate iteration. With my business partner Reuben, who is as laser-focused (and delightfully nerdy) about process and systems as I am. We track every single metric. After each webinar, we picked ONE thing to improve. Just one. And then we ran it again.

The result? Our most recent webinar brought in 5x the revenue of our first one. Same basic structure. Same offer. But refined, deliberately, over 10 weeks and 5 iterations. And now, as we head into 2026, we know exactly how we will continue to scale those results.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

Now, here's where it gets personal.

The last few months have been hard. Really freaking hard. I've been dealing with health challenges that have forced me to radically rethink what I can actually do.

And what I actually WANT to do.

Here's the short version: I have Hashimoto's (an autoimmune disease), and last November I discovered that I'd had an asymptomatic dental infection from a botched root canal in 2015. Nearly a decade of my body fighting something I didn't even know was there.

For years, I had so many strange symptoms that I've constantly been in and out of doctor’s offices.

I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars, had fleeting moments of hope after the latest diagnosis, only to wind up continuing to struggle and wondering what the hell was wrong with me.

All of it, I now realize, was caused by this chronic, low-grade infection—compounded by years of stress from life, work, and a dog attack in 2020 that left me with physical injuries and trauma I'm still processing.

The infection is gone now. But here's the cruel irony: now that my immune system can stop fighting it, my body is finally dealing with the aftermath.

I've felt worse in the last three months than I have in the last decade. My immune system is resetting. My nervous system is recalibrating. And I have doctors assuring me this is actually healing.

But holy shit, it's been hard.

Over the last two months, I've been able to work about 25-40% of what I'm used to.

For someone who's ambitious and driven and wants to build something massive, this has been humbling. Frustrating. Sometimes infuriating.

But it's also been clarifying.

Because when you can't do everything, you're forced to figure out what actually matters. When capacity is genuinely limited, you stop pretending you can "do it all" and start making real choices, looking at not just what you can do, but what you truly want to do.

Which brings me to my theme for the new year.

During COVID, after the dog attack, I couldn't handle watching anything negative or violent. And if you've noticed, basically everything on TV is negative and violent.

So I got hooked on Ted Lasso and The Great British Bake Off. Comfort TV. Kind humans being kind to each other.

I loved Bake Off so much that my husband convinced me to watch all of Top Chef with him. We're both total foodies, so it was an easy sell.

And I noticed something after watching season after season. In the challenges where the chefs have free rein—cook whatever you want, use any ingredients—the food is often the worst. They overthink. They try to do too much. They get lost in the possibilities.

But in the super restrictive challenges—cook using only ingredients from a gas station, make a dish in 20 minutes with five ingredients—they produce some of the best food of the entire season.

The host, Tom Colicchio, says it all the time: "Constraint breeds creativity."

That phrase has stuck with me for years. And it's why I'm so passionate about systems and processes, even though that might sound boring.

Because when you create constraints for yourself—when you take the boring, repetitive decisions off your plate—it actually frees you to be wildly creative in the work that matters.

The constraint isn't a cage, but the container that makes creativity possible.

A theme isn't a way to measure whether you win or lose some arbitrary game you’ve set for yourself the way resolutions often are. An annual theme is your decision filter.

Every choice—what to work on, what to say no to, who to collaborate with, what to cut—runs through the filter.

Here's why this is so powerful: One decision makes a thousand decisions easier.

→ When I chose Craftsmanship, I didn't have to agonize over whether to keep shipping chaotic, last-minute work. The theme answered for me.

→ When I chose Slow is Smooth, I didn't have to debate whether to skip the tracking and just launch. The theme answered for me.

→ And now, when I choose Constraint Breeds Creativity, I won’t have to feel guilty about not doing more. The theme is giving me permission to do less, but on purpose. Doing the things that I love AND drive my business forward…and nothing else.

That's leverage. One commitment that compounds across every decision you make for an entire year. And then it keeps compounding, long after that year ends.

And what’s more is that aligned decisions create a business that doesn't burn you out. Every time you make a choice that fits who you actually are and how you actually want to work, you're building something sustainable.

Every misaligned decision, even a "successful" one, puts another bar on a cage with your name on the door.

I’m a big fan of goals. And an even bigger fan of specific metrics and a detailed 90 day plan, but let’s be real. Life will happen, and you need a more flexible, yet still clarifying way to chart your path forward.

You need a filter. A North Star that guides you toward the Future You vision you have for yourself and your business.

What would it look like to enter 2025 with ONE word or phrase that guides everything? Not twelve resolutions you'll abandon by Valentine's Day. Not a spreadsheet of targets that'll make you feel like a failure by March.

Just a lens. A filter. A way to make the thousand daily decisions a little clearer.

Your theme doesn't have to be profound. It doesn't have to be clever. It just has to be true—to where you are and what you need right now.

On Sunday, I'm going to share how to actually find your theme, including the year-end review template I use to get there. If you're not sure where to start, that'll help.

But for now, I'd love to know: What theme is landing for you as you think about next year? Or what are you wrestling with as you try to figure it out?

Hit reply. I read every one.

In love, growth, and alignment,
Kasey