New Year’s Resolutions Are Broken. Here’s What to Do Instead

Why Systems Outperform Resolutions Every Time

Ah, here we are, wrapping up another year.
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The air is full of New Year’s resolutions, goals, and big plans for 2025.
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​What do you want to achieve? When will you get there?
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​But what if goal setting is actually holding you back?
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What if there’s a better way to get what you want next year?

SYSTEMS vs GOALS

I recently stumbled across an article by James Clear – Author of Atomic Habits called Forget about setting goals.

In it, he poses a powerful question:

“If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed?”

For us as traders, that means:

  • Building strong trading habits instead of obsessing over profit goals.
  • Developing a consistent daily process for analysing markets and executing trades.
  • Shifting your mindset from results to process—good systems lead to good outcomes.
  • Prioritising skill-building (like pattern recognition and decision-making) over short-term profits.
  • Using feedback from your trading journal to refine your system, not just measure progress toward goals.

In other words, focus entirely on the systems that lead to success, not the goals themselves.

I’ve always believed traders who focus on the process tend to outperform those fixated on results.

But James Clear lays it out beautifully, with reasons and science to back it up.

So, maybe this year your New Year’s resolutions shouldn’t be about goals…

Maybe they should be about building systems.