John Oliver's advice on how to keep to New Year's resolutions
'The key to a successful resolution... is managing disappointment'
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Your support makes all the difference.John Oliver has advised his viewers to “manage their expectations” in order to avoid failing their New Years resolutions.
The British presenter who is the host of HBO’s satirical Last Week Tonight revised a monologue which effectively presented the problem with January.
“Every December, for some reason we decide that next year will be the year that we turn everything around,” he says.
Calling resolutions the “exact middle ground between lying to yourself and lying to other people”, he says that "statistically" if you have not broken your resolutions by now, “you’re about to”.
But far from dispiriting viewers, Oliver hoped to instead inspire them by saying “the key thing with resolutions is not how to keep them but how to revise them when you’ve failed”, as the main problem with resolutions is that “we set them way too high”.
So, for example, Oliver advises waking up late for work or taking a pregnancy test to get the heart rate going instead of paying a visit to the gym. This is because real exercise is “hard” so it’s best to change the meaning of exercise thus managing the resolution.
Oliver, 38, concludes: “The key to a successful resolution is not hard work and dedication, it’s managing disappointment and that’s it.”
Aside from this advice, a recent study revealed framing resolutions as questions as opposed to statements is a more likely way to ensure people stick to their goals.
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