How to make positive resolutions.
And support things that are important to you
Happy New Year! And thank you all for your support as I share these adventures with you.
I have a kind of radical idea I want to share with you, and I also want to ask you for a favor.
First, let’s talk about resolutions. We all know they don’t work very well, and lots of folks have offered theories for why they don’t work. And so I’m going to give you mine, and some simple ideas to make your 2025 resolutions work better for you.
I think the most challenging thing about resolutions is giving up something that you’re in the habit of enjoying. Maybe enjoying too much, which is why you want to quit. But we know life is complex, and if you stop pushing this button here, there’s another button over there that appears. And it may be worse than the first button
So let’s start with new buttons.
Let’s resolved to do more positive things. Sometimes they’ll be new, but other things will be replacements for things we want to do less often. So let’s put some positive things out there, and in 2025 resolve to:
Walk more.
Eat more fruits and vegetables.
Cook more.
Be more mindful about where you are and what you’re doing.
Spend more time with friends.
Use more olive oil.
Plan meals ahead, including how to use leftovers.
Read the whole recipe before you start cooking (sometimes the day before!).
Make big batches of beans and brown rice and roasted veggies to use all week.
Read more books.
Write more.
Say “I love you” more.
All great things, positive things, we can easily do more of, and do less of other things.
And now a favor, or actually several, or maybe it’s really multiple choice.
Buy me a cup of coffee.
I love using Substack because it’s easy to write and post and share, but I know it can be confusing for new users, because there are so many options, when maybe you just want to get my posts via email (just subscribe, enter your email, and then opt out of everything else that comes up).
There’s also this subscription/subscriber thing. I struggled with that at first, because I wanted to give extra value to people who paid for a subscription with posts no one else could access. I’ve rethought that, and decided I just want to write things and share them with everyone, and you all can decide on your own to subscribe.
But I’d also like us all to look at this differently, not as “Brian is publishing a magazine and I want to subscribe” or “I want to pay Brian so I can read special content.”
Rather, how about “I really enjoyed reading that post, and I’d like to buy Brian a cup of coffee to thank him for it.”
There are several ways to do that with extra apps and buttons and whatnot, but for now we can stay inside the Substack environment. This button will take you to my subscription page, where you can subscribe for a year, or for a month. I’ve temporarily reduced the subscription rates, and the monthly is now $5, or about the cost of a cup of coffee. (Well, a fancy coffee, or an espresso with a pastry, so maybe it’s more like breakfast.) You can subscribe for a month, and then shut it off so it’s just one time.
Thank you in advance for supporting this.
I DO NOT want anyone to feel obligated. Read it, enjoy it, use it — I was tickled by how many people read the Olive Oil post and told me they went right to their cupboard to check their bottles! You don’t need to pay anything to subscribe.
But if you got some value from what you read, and you want to support more writing, you have an easy option.
And if you don’t want to pay anything, but you’d like to do something else to support me, you can share my posts with your friends. Or post a comment, or write me a note.
Whatever you do, thank you so very much for all of your support.
I love you.
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