New year’s resolutions embody the Hollywood ideal that all you need to do declare how badly you want something, then you can get it, and everything else will somehow work out. Unfortunately that’s a recipe for credit-card debt instead of self-improvement. Which is why I’ve found five ways to make new year’s resolutions which work.
1. Use A Genie
(Source: Disney)
Pro: A spiritual djinn, a magical being made of smokeless and scorching fire, is still the most sensible way to expect that simply saying something will cause it to happen.
Con: Genies are usually total pricks about it. Something about being enslaved and then forced to labor by someone who can’t even be bothered to speak their original language. If you wish to lose weight, you’re likely to lose your legs in a car crash. If you resolve to spend more time with your family, you’ll be put into a coma by the same car crash and they’ll all gather to have the life-support conversation.
2. Be Batman
Batman can resolve anything up to and including Kryptonian attack (Source: DC)
Pro: Batman is the avatar of self-improvement, routinely outperforming people with incredible natural advantages through sheer determination and hard work.
Con: None of your resolutions can be fun. You’ll spend the new year tracking down the munitions factory where Calendar Man made the Auld Land Mines you spent New Year’s Eve defusing, and any spare time will go into learning to rap in Rongorongo to be prepared for any possible Silver Banshee/Music Meister team-up.
3. Use A Cosmic Cube
(Source: Marvel)
Pro: New year’s resolutions are about skipping all the complicated work and thought involved in making an interesting change to you world and instead using a few lazy words. Which is exactly what Marvel did with the Cosmic Cube. Just getting things done no matter how stupid or impossible they should be is exactly and literally the cube’s function.
Con: The only Cosmic Cube wishes which ever stay wished are the ones which undo previous wishes. In fact, as the existence of these total reality-rewrite engines doesn’t seem to affect everyday life in the Marvel universe at all, they’re actually representations of how people ignore the benefits of incredible new technologies and opportunities in favor of laziness.
4. SERPENTOR VOICE!
Pro: Beats the hell out of the wheedling wimp-tone normally adopted by self-help confectioners. Issue all resolutions to yourself in the tone of Serpentor, and they’ll be far more effective. THIS I COMMAND!
Con: I’m going to level with you: this has never, ever worked for Serpentor, and that has never, ever stopped me from continuing to emulate him. (Thanks to @funranium for introducing me to this and many more self-improvement facts.)
5. Downgrade To Daily
It turns out that gathering up all your urges to improve yourself and grow for an entire year into one annual spurt only works when you’re a plant. Us animals need to get a more metabolic move on.
I talked about how to make reasonable resolutions last year, and as part of the whole point I’m improving on that this year: make daily resolutions instead. First thing in the morning, write down what you want to improve that day and then save the file. The next morning you open it, read it, delete the text, and rewrite. The vast majority of our petty failures come from a simple lack of thought. This process refreshes the urge every morning, enables your brain when you face the relevant problem, and if you’re a writer it’s a sneaky way to get the word-motors revved in the process.
Continue your auto-upgrade campaign with these self-improvement guides:
Luke Writes What You Read 
I know there’s a special kind of hell reserved for people who make fun of spelling mistakes, and that’s really not a place I’m keen on visiting. But in the first paragraph you use the word ‘resolutinos’, and I can’t help but envision some sort of subatomic particle associated with willpower.
“Exactly once every solar year, the planet Earth is hit by a large wave of resolutinos. Most of these pass through the planet and its inhabitants without effect, but small amounts of them have been known to accumulate in the brains of human beings: this causes in them an increased desire to get shit done. It is probably not accidental that the humans’ yearly calender cycle coincides with this event.
Sadly, resolutinos are volatile: they quickly fall apart into frustratans, regretions, and can’t-be-arays.”
Haha, thanks for that! The funnest bit of proof-reading I’ve ever experienced.