24 March: the new New Year's Day
New Year's Day has a branding problem. Here's how we fix it.
If someone asked me to redesign the calendar, I’d start the New Year on 24 March. Between Jesus’s circumcision and my birthday, I choose my birthday.
Cynics will say my over-inflated ego has taken over the asylum. Are we to rename March to Alexary, too?
But, let’s face it, New Year’s Day has a branding problem: its real, lived-in brand experience is very far from feeling anything like new.
24 March, by contrast, is all fresh air and springtime delight. So new!
“So what?” you say.
Well, there’s a phoney kind of New Year’s resolution that only exists as a result of New Year’s Day not matching its claim of newness with its experience. You know the type: vague, abstract, makes you feel ambitious just for having it. Get healthier. Build a great company. Change the world.
The problem isn’t that these resolutions lack ambition, it’s that our short-term actions are often hilariously misaligned with our long-term goals.
Now, here’s something most economists take for granted but most humans ignore: markets are forward-looking. Prices today contain expectations about tomorrow. Want to raise house prices in your neighbourhood today? Announce the construction of a new school to open in three years’ time.
One way to phrase this is that “the future reaches back and grabs the present by the collar”.
So, why don’t we run our lives with the same intelligence as the markets?
Take a classic example. A man wants to be healthy. But every evening in January, he chooses Netflix, beer and junk food. He wakes up full of regret, swears tomorrow will be different, and then—astonishingly—does the exact same thing again! A good, long walk never shows up as an option in the winter.
So, this is why most resolutions fail: they don’t “reach and grab the present by the collar”. They float above life, admired but irrelevant.
There are two ways to change this.
The first way: create a “holy grail”. A goal so ridiculously compelling you’d fight a bear for it. The funny thing is you’re not even supposed to reach it. Its real job is to grab your present by the collar and yell: “Absolutely not, you chaotic gremlin!” when you veer off-course. Think of SpaceX’s holy grail: Mars. Even if nobody ends up gardening on Mars, we still get reusable rockets and global internet. Nice.
Holy grails force certain choices. “Be successful” won’t stop you from doing dumb stuff, but “make all the world’s information universally accessible and useful” will make some ideas just feel wrong.
The second way: make the daily task enjoyable. Humans are weirdly great at this—a species that went from “eat or die” to Michelin-star restaurants, and from “wear this or die” to “this jacket is so me”. If working toward your goal feels as good as binge-watching a Netflix series, you’ll stick with it.
Which brings me back to our Netflix, beer and junk food man. How do we get a good, long walk to show up on his options list?
By starting the New Year, not in the winter, but on that most glorious day: 24 March.