Luv Doc: Small Tweaks

Dear Luv Doc,

Every year around this time, I make New Year's resolutions that never seem to last. Lose weight. Get back on Tinder. Find a boyfriend. Travel more. Go see more live shows. Make new friends. January is always a real barn burner, but then by Valentine's day, I am back on my couch smoking pot, eating queso, and watching reruns of The Office. Any suggestion on how I can make my resolve last longer than a month?

– Lump

I'd say if you're smoking pot and eating queso, you're pretty much crushing it. How much more self-improvement do you really need to do? The Office is a really solid comedy as well, and I haven't even watched it stoned. I don't want to get too esoteric here, but I feel like The Office may be a bit too nuanced and cerebral to appreciate baked. It's no Chappelle's Show, but it's at least a few notches up from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a show that sledgehammers you with stupidity for a solid 25 minutes ... but ... I mean ... in a good, Simpsons/South Park kind of way.

So you want a new you for all of 2019? I like your ambition! Far be it from me to naysay that project. Just know that to storm that hill, you will have to run past the corpses of not only your own failed ambitions, but the failed ambitions of thousands of others as well. All that carnage can be ... well ... discouraging seems a bit of an understatement.

Since I have my own mile-high stack of personal failures, I am going to have to go to the experts on this one (and by that, I mean I Googled some shit on New Year's resolutions) and the reigning wisdom seems to be that if you want to actually achieve goals, you have to set them. Sounds reasonable, right? There is a process here. You set goals, and then you achieve them. Eureka!

Here's the big secret, however (and I wish I had thought of this myself): You have to set very realistic goals, and more importantly, small goals that are easily achievable. This revelation was pretty exciting to me because it's right up my slacker alley. Instead of "losing weight" or "getting thin," you can just do a small tweak – like not eating queso after midnight or maybe limit binge-drinking to one night a week.

The idea is that from these smaller successes you will go on to bigger ones. Eventually, "no queso after midnight" becomes "no queso except on the weekends," which turns into "no queso except on Super Bowl Sunday" because we're not vegan fucking monks, are we? Ideally, from there, you drop three dress sizes and Chris Pine hits you up on Tinder because of your mutual love of The Office and pretty soon the new you is planting a glorious victory flag atop Mount Self-Improvement.

As ever, the devil is in the details, but this seems like a pretty good plan to me.