The new year marks a season of expectation, guilt, and failure brought on by one of the curses of our primate nature, the New Year’s Resolution. It’s been decades since I joked that my new year’s resolution was to give up making any. I encourage you to join me, and I’ll give you a very good reason: That’s not how we actually change our lives for the better.

Let’s start with a myth. Many people think personal change is largely (or entirely) a matter of willpower. However exhilarating a sense of sheer willpower may feel, however much we may tell ourselves stories of people who changed their lives through that mysterious force, willpower is actually an acute state of anticipatory accomplishment. Not real success, notice, but the anticipation of savoring some future success. In that state of anticipation, we are susceptible of making what are essentially promises to ourselves. And when accomplishment eludes our grasp, we realize that we have failed, and we feel what all promise-breakers feel: guilt.

You shouldn’t be so pessimistic about human nature, Matthew some of you may be thinking. If you were among those advising me along that line, let me ask you a question. Which is more pessimistic: Telling ourselves a story about how we would like to be but aren’t, or taking charge by acknowledging a pattern that’s right in front of us? I vote for taking charge.

Taking charge of change is analogous to just about every other process of shaping the natural course of things to achieve our goals, and step 1 is to note the patterns that serve as clues as to the natural course of things. In our case — meaning, rational animals — the pattern we have to accept is our tendency to indulge in magical thinking. And if conjuring a sense of accomplishment at an unfulfilled self-promise isn’t a form of sympathetic magic, then I don’t know what might count.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that setting goals is bad. Rather, I’m saying that achieving goals is a question of choosing the right approach, and sympathetic magic has a pretty poor track record. Aristotle talks about an approach that is as reliable as it is boring: habit. Or rather, intentional habits.

Perhaps your current promise to yourself is to get in shape — a worthy goal, without question. Instead of a vow to yourself to get up every morning and run two or three miles, suppose you try altering one current habit, to make it work for you. Something simple, like, instead of driving past the mailbox on the way home, park in your driveway and walk to pick up your mail. Take the stairs. Walk to lunch and back. You get the idea.

Give yourself a few weeks to let small, deliberate choices become part of your routine. Then build on those intentionally-cultivated habits, perhaps by expanding. Instead of walking straight to the mailbox, walk around the block and pass the mailbox on the second or even the third round.

Small, intentional actions accumulate and blossom, not just into big habits, but into a sense of satisfaction of what you are making of yourself, which reinforces those habits. This satisfaction, which we earn through daily decisions, may not as dramatic as superhuman acts of willpower, but that’s the point: they aren’t. They’re within reach, for each of us mortals.

Which bring us to excellence. Aristotle argues that excellence is not the result of isolated exercises of willpower, but the outcome of intentionally-cultivated habits operating over time. Nature is replete with repetitive actions, but in most cases, living beings are impelled to act by their natures, not by their choices. Animal habits are Nature’s work; the Divine Mind just is what it thinks. We are neither — but strangely enough, both.

Rational animals, being animals, have all sorts of tendencies that easily become habitual, but our rational part endows us with the ability to choose our actions — and therefore our habits. If we think of human deeds through the lens of deliberate choice, we can easily succumb to the willpower myth. But looking at ourselves with habits in mind, we see our behavior in a different light.

But animals like us have the capacity for reason, too. For Aristotle, the power of practical reason — that is, reason applied to taking action — lies in charting a course that makes good choices habitual. My favorite analogy is playing a musical instrument. Suppose you want to play bassoon. Initially, just about everything you do with your bassoon, including just holding it, requires focussed and intentional — even painstaking — decision-making. Over time, however, you start doing things with less and less focussed effort. It’s as if you “automatically” pick it up and hold it in the right position; holding the bassoon properly becomes increasingly habitual.

The nice thing about habitual actions is that you don’t have to spend a lot of energy intending to do them, and that frees energy that you can apply to other aspects of playing the bassoon, like embouchure. (Embouchure is a fancy word for getting your lips just right on the reed.) And, almost magically, those actions become habitual, too, so we can focus on still more advanced skills. That’s how we build toward excellence: By cultivating a series of interlocking habits conducive to the goal.

But it isn’t magic; it’s practice. As in, regular, repetitive, intentional practice over a long enough period of time that habits start to form.

You may be tempted to fall back on a version of the willpower myth and invoke self-discipline. There’s a lot to be said for intending to cultivate those small habits, but self-discipline is what we see in the rear-view mirror after we’ve cultivated a set of habits that have led to accomplishment.

Of course, we can make one-off decisions about one-off actions, but such decisions and the actions that result don’t reliably lead toward excellence. As an experiment, try this: Decide, with as much determination as you can muster, to play the bassoon, and see if you can suddenly pick one up and play. It’s true that someone occasionally comes along and does something brilliantly on the first try, but don’t we usually chalk that up to beginner’s luck or extraordinary talent? Consistency in the pursuit of excellence requires something more.

We tend to think that the traits we associate with being a good person aren’t like this. Yes, playing the bassoon takes practice; courage or justice is a matter of character. But that’s the point: We don’t wake up one day and pronounce ourselves courageous. Courage is as courage does. And does, and does, and does.

That’s the connection between habits and character. As Aristotle says, just about all the excellences we’re capable of are like playing the bassoon, namely, the result of deliberately cultivated habits toward some goal. So, let’s break the habit of looking to willpower and start focusing on the daily business of cultivating habits toward our goals.

What goals? you ask? That is also a job for practical reason. And another post.