Hey,

So you have set the dots for this year.

The big goal. The habits to build. The bad ones to remove. The projects and milestones you want to reach.

Good.

But let me remind you of something.

A year passes quickly. And you will face hard days just like good days. Maybe more hard days than good.

So I gathered 30 insights from people who have spent their careers studying this. Not selling courses. Studying human behaviour, motivation, and performance for decades.

Save this email. Return to it when you need it.

On Starting Right

1. BJ Fogg (Stanford Behavior Design Lab): People do not change by deciding to change. They change by designing for change. Put the book on your pillow. Put the gym clothes by the door. Remove friction for good behaviours, add friction for bad ones.

2. Wendy Wood (USC, 30+ years studying habits): 43% of what you do daily happens while you are thinking about something else. Your job is not more willpower. It is better autopilot.

3. Gabriele Oettingen (NYU): Visualising success actually drains motivation. Your brain registers the reward without the work. Instead, imagine the obstacle. Then plan around it.

4. James Clear: You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Build the machine that produces the goal.

5. Anders Ericsson (father of deliberate practice): Most people repeat what they are already good at. Experts target exactly what they cannot do. One hour of deliberate practice beats ten hours of comfortable repetition.

On Procrastination

6. Piers Steel (University of Calgary): Procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotion regulation problem. You are not avoiding the task. You are avoiding the feeling the task gives you.

7. Tim Pychyl (Carleton University, 25+ years on procrastination): Action creates motivation. Not the other way around. Start anyway. For two minutes. The feeling follows.

8. Fuschia Sirois (University of Sheffield): Procrastinators are not lazy. They are often perfectionists who catastrophise. The cure is not discipline. It is self-compassion.

9. BJ Fogg: If you are avoiding something, make it laughably small. Do not "work on the project." Just open the document. Tiny behaviours bypass resistance.

10. Nir Eyal: Time management is pain management. Put your hardest task at a fixed time. Not "sometime today" but "9:00 AM, door closed, phone gone."

On Days When You Have Zero Motivation

11. Angela Duckworth (UPenn, studied grit for a decade): Grit is not about never feeling unmotivated. It is about what you do despite feeling unmotivated. Motivation is a bonus, not a requirement.

12. Steven Pressfield: The professional shows up every day, no matter what. You do not need to produce something great. You need to show up. Both count equally.

13. Roy Baumeister (pioneered self-control research): Willpower fatigues like a muscle. If you have no motivation today, check: Did you sleep? Did you eat? Did you already make 50 small decisions? Sometimes the most productive thing is rest.

14. Carol Dweck (Stanford, growth mindset): When you feel demotivated, you might be thinking "if I were talented, this would be easy." It would not. The struggle is the work.

15. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (discovered "flow"): Motivation emerges when challenge matches skill. If you feel nothing, you are either bored or overwhelmed. Adjust the difficulty until you feel pulled in.

On Pushing Without Results

16. Adam Grant (Wharton): The most dangerous time is after you have invested a lot. Sunk cost bias kicks in. But the time is gone either way. The question is: Is the future path worth it, starting from today?

17. Annie Duke (decision scientist): Quitting is not failure. Staying too long is. When you have new information that changes your expected outcome, it is time to reconsider.

18. Angela Duckworth: Grit does not mean sticking with everything. It means sticking with your top-level goal while being flexible on tactics. The direction stays. The method adapts.

19. Seth Godin: The Dip is where most people quit. That is exactly why the few who push through win. But know the difference: Is this a Dip (temporary) or a Dead End (permanent)? Dead ends: quit early. Dips: push harder.

20. Carol Dweck: The word "yet" changes everything. "This is not working" versus "This is not working yet." But add a deadline. If no signal in three months, reevaluate.

On Knowing When to Quit

21. Daniel Kahneman (Nobel laureate): Losses feel twice as painful as gains feel good. You avoid quitting because it feels like losing. But sometimes quitting is the gain. You get time, energy, and mental space back.

22. Annie Duke: Set "kill criteria" before you start. Write it down: "If X has not happened in six months, I stop." Your calm past self already made the decision for your emotional future self.

23. Ozan Varol (former rocket scientist): There is no glory in going down with the ship when you could have built a better one. Pivoting is not defeat. Slack, YouTube, Instagram all started as something else.

24. Eric Ries (Lean Startup): Do not ask "Is this failing?" Ask "What am I learning?" No results plus new learning: keep going. No results plus no learning: walk away.

On When You Feel It Will Never Work

25. Albert Bandura (Stanford, 50 years on self-efficacy): Belief does not come from pep talks. It comes from small wins. Shrink the goal until you can win today. Confidence is built, not summoned.

26. Martin Seligman (founder of positive psychology): Learned helplessness comes from believing failure is permanent, pervasive, and personal. Challenge all three. Things change. Other areas work. External factors exist.

27. Viktor Frankl (psychiatrist, survived concentration camps): Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is your power to choose. You can feel hopeless and still choose the next small action.

28. Carol Dweck: Failure is information, not identity. You ran an experiment and got a result. Now you have data. The only real failure is refusing to adjust.

On Bad Habits You Want to Remove

29. Wendy Wood: You cannot just stop a habit. You have to replace it or remove its trigger. If you scroll in bed, charge your phone in another room. Do not rely on resistance.

30. Judson Brewer (Brown University, neuroscientist): Willpower fails because it fights the habit. Curiosity dismantles it. Next time, do not resist. Get curious. How does this actually feel? Often, the reward is not that good. Awareness breaks the loop.

These are not motivational quotes.

These are conclusions from decades of research on how humans actually behave, change, and persist.

Save this. Read it again in March when the motivation fades.

Read it again in July when you want to quit.

The year will test you.

Now you have the answers before the questions arrive.

👉 Still didn't plan this year yet? Get it done with Second Brain 6.0 🧠 28% OFF

See you soon, insha'Allah.

Osama (OLS)