Against Resolutions: The Power of Ritual
Takeaways:
Citing a failed attempt to run a marathon without adequate training earlier in her adult life, Jaouad cautions readers against the way New Year’s resolutions push us into outcome-driven, binary thinking: success or failure. She argues that this framework sets many resolutions up to fail—and often at a high emotional cost.
Rather than viewing our goals through the prism of “resolutions,” Jaouad suggests reframing them as rituals. Where resolutions demand control, rituals are relational. Where resolutions fixate on outcomes, rituals attend to process.
She points to examples like Georgia O’Keeffe, who took a 30-minute walk each morning in the desert, often alone, believing the walking itself was where the work of painting began. Ludwig van Beethoven, meanwhile, famously counted out exactly 60 coffee beans per cup. These practices weren’t about efficiency or output; they were about creating the conditions in which meaningful, productive work could emerge.
Jaouad encourages readers to look at the goals they typically build resolutions around and instead focus on establishing rituals that “set the table” for pursuing those goals—whether that means carving out time to brew and enjoy coffee, going for walks, journaling, meditating, or adopting other grounding practices.
For example, consider someone whose New Year’s resolution is to lose ten pounds—a clear outcome without a plan. Approached as a ritual, this goal becomes a process: finding satisfying, nourishing meals to prepare or building consistent, enjoyable habits around physical movement.
Every January, Jaouad sets out on a 30 day journaling ritual. She does not try to meet a word count, or give herself any real structural or outcome-based constraints. Sometimes she writes a lot, sometimes she writes only a little. But she notes that making time to complete the ritual each day allows her to accomplish meaningful progress & productive work once the ritual is complete. She says that rituals like this one offer a means of “keeping my balance without gripping so tightly.”
While resolutions often ask us to discard who we are at point A and over-idealize who we hope to be at point B—without clearly outlining how that transformation occurs—the power of ritual lies in enriching the process and supporting the journey of becoming the person you want to be.
By Suleika Jaouad for The The Substack Post
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