Rolling into a new year always seems to come with this strange cultural pressure to become a completely different person overnight. New year, new me. Flip the switch. Delete the old version. Install the upgrade. Then discover the upgrade has bugs and no rollback option. It sounds neat, but it almost never works that way in real life.
I wrote a few days ago about repetition and how real change comes from doing the same small things consistently, and I will link to that article again because it matters here. Big change usually fails not because people lack motivation, but because they aim for dramatic transformation instead of focused direction.
Every January I see the same thing. Someone decides they're done being a couch potato and declares they're now working out three hours a day, eating perfectly, sleeping eight hours, and never touching sugar again. That plan usually survives about a week, maybe two, and then reality taps them on the shoulder. The problem was never effort. The problem was scale (no, not "the" scale - although that can be a problem too). Change that's too large collapses under its own weight like trying to drink from a fire hose. Slow change actually has a chance to stick.
I see this clearly in my own work. I didn't wake up one morning and decide I was going to dominate every Microsoft Access keyword on Google and YouTube. That would've been absurd. What I did instead was show up. Almost every day. For years. I recorded videos. I answered questions. I filled in gaps. And after about five years of that, something interesting happened. If you search for a lot of Access topics now, one of my videos (hopefully) shows up. (1) I'm genuinely proud of that, but it wasn't magic and it wasn't fast. It was a long series of small, daily decisions made consistently. No dramatic reinvention required.
Software development works the same way. Good systems aren't built in giant heroic rewrites. They're built through iteration. Small refactors. Incremental improvements. Fixing one ugly thing at a time. Every experienced developer knows the big rewrite fantasy usually ends in disaster, or at least a very long meeting explaining why the order-entry system doesn't work anymore. The code that survives is the code that evolves. You don't go from spaghetti to elegance in one sprint. You do it by tightening one knot at a time. The database that currently runs my business was started in 2002 and has slowly evolved over the past quarter century. Sure, there are still some bits of code that I run into and I say to myself what was I thinking? But it works. Every day.
Nobody wakes up one morning instantly knowing how to design a clean relational database or debug a nasty performance issue. You learn one concept, then another. You apply them badly at first, then slightly less badly. Eventually you stop having to think so hard about it. That doesn't come from a weekend boot camp. It comes from steady exposure and repetition over time. That's one of the reasons I repeat important concepts over and over again in my lessons. Start with the basics. Watch one video a day if that's all you have time for. You'll get it. Slowly but surely. It's taken me 30+ years to gain the knowledge I have.
Business is another obvious example. Companies like Microsoft and NVIDIA didn't become giants because of a single bold move or a viral moment. They got there through thousands of small decisions, investments, corrections, and long-term bets. Growth compounded. People love to point at the end result and call it success, but they ignore the decades of incremental work that made it possible. Overnight success stories usually have very long nights behind them. Usually filled with spreadsheets, stress, sleeping in your office, and drinking way too much coffee.
Personal relationships aren't any different. You don't build trust, connection, or intimacy with one grand gesture a year. You build it by showing up. Listening. Following through. Holding that person's hand when they're having a rough day. Doing the small things consistently. Relationships fail for the same reason extreme resolutions fail. People try to fix everything all at once instead of improving one behavior at a time. For goodness' sake, put your toothbrush away.
Government suffers from this misunderstanding constantly. Everyone wants sweeping change, but our systems are built around short election cycles. When politicians are worried about the next two or four years, long-term thinking gets crowded out. Real policy progress tends to be incremental. Slow adjustments. Pilot programs. Revisions based on evidence. That's frustrating for people who want instant results, but it's usually how durable change actually happens. The obsession with dramatic swings often produces backlash instead of progress. Real change happens on much longer scales - unless you're talking about revolution, which tends to replace one mess with a slightly different mess, and even then the cleanup takes decades.
Investing is another perfect example of this mindset. You don't get wealthy by making one huge, perfectly timed move, despite what social media and late-night gurus would have you believe. Very few people get rich by dumping everything into a single stock and getting lucky. What actually works is boring. Small, regular investments made consistently over time, letting compounding do its thing. Time in the market beats timing the market almost every time. The people who quietly build real wealth aren't chasing explosions. They're making incremental decisions, staying invested through ups and downs, and giving their money years or decades to grow. Just like everything else, it's patience and consistency that win, not dramatic bets.
Speaking of money, poker is another great example of this. I used to play a good deal of poker back in the day. When people watch the World Series of Poker on TV, they mostly see the final tables, the dramatic all-ins, and the big, cinematic moments where everything is decided in one hand. What they don't show nearly as much are the early rounds, where good players are just grinding. Folding bad hands. Making small, disciplined bets. Paying attention. Knowing when not to play is just as important as knowing when to push. That slow, relentless grind is what builds a chip stack from almost nothing into something formidable. And once you've done that work, you're finally in a position to make those big moves when it actually makes sense. The drama comes at the end, but it's the patience and consistency early on that make it possible at all.
As I mentioned earlier, fitness is where this becomes painfully obvious, and personal. I didn't decide one day that I was going to lose 100 pounds overnight. I started at 316 pounds about 6 months ago. My goal is 220, because that's where I feel best. I just broke 290 after being stuck there for months (a vacation, Thanksgiving, and a surgery didn't help). My target is about a pound a week, and that means daily lifestyle changes I can actually sustain. The scale doesn't care about motivation speeches, inspirational quotes, or what day of the week it is. It responds to consistency. I track my calories (in my Fitness database - plug with full shame). I workout as often as I can. I go for walks. Daily lifestyle changes.
Rush nailed this idea in the song Marathon: "You can do a lot in a lifetime, if you don't burn out too fast. You can make the most of the distance. First you need endurance. First you've got to last." That's really the whole point. Lasting progress isn't about speed. It's about endurance. You don't win by sprinting until you collapse. You win by pacing yourself well enough to stay in the race.
I think one area where the idea of instant transformation does the most damage is in religion and philosophy. There's a belief that you can fundamentally change yourself by simply adopting a new belief system. Accept the belief, become new. The problem is that belief alone doesn't rewrite biology, habits, or reality. Change still requires action. Repetition. Feedback. Evidence. Belief without behavior is just a story you tell yourself. Wishful thinking. Anyone promising instant enlightenment is usually selling something. And sometimes, belief systems invent the disease so they can sell you the cure. (2)
Science and critical thinking push back against that idea in a healthier way. Minds usually don't change because of one argument or one dramatic revelation. They change through gradual exposure to evidence, experience, and better explanations. That process is slow, and it's supposed to be. Science favors curiosity over certainty, testing ideas against reality, and adjusting when the evidence changes, which turns out to be a pretty solid approach to life in general.
We like to imagine science as a series of sudden Eureka moments from lone geniuses, but that's mostly a myth. Real breakthroughs usually come from slow, methodical work. Careful study. Repeated experiments. Failed tests. Adjustments. Edison didn't change the world by having one brilliant idea. He changed it by trying hundreds of versions of lightbulbs that didn't work before finding one that did. Lasting discoveries aren't lightning strikes. They're the result of patience, persistence, and incremental progress that holds up when tested against reality.
Even evolution itself is a lesson in patience. We didn't become the dominant species on this planet overnight. It took millions of years of incremental changes, environmental pressures, random mutations, and yes, a little help from an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Nature didn't hit a reset button. It iterated. Slowly. Relentlessly. Over absurd spans of time.
Star Trek actually understands this idea when it's being honest with itself. A Starfleet captain isn't made overnight. Nobody steps onto the bridge fully formed with wisdom, discipline, and moral clarity preinstalled. They go through the Academy. They learn theory. They make mistakes. They serve under other officers. They spend years as cadets, ensigns, and lieutenants, slowly earning experience and trust. Picard didn't just wake up one day as Picard. He became that captain through decades of study, service, failure, and growth. The authority we admire isn't the result of a single moment. It's the accumulation of thousands of small ones. (3)
So as we roll into a new year, my advice is simple. Pick a direction, not a transformation. Make one small change you can actually live with. Then repeat it. Let time do the heavy lifting. That approach isn't exciting, but it's effective. And in my experience, effective beats dramatic every time.
And as I've already said to everyone in my Happy New Year video, I wish you all a happy, healthy, and productive new year. Here's to learning new things, building better databases, and boldly moving into 2026 together.
LLAP
RR
(1) Sometimes even one I forgot I recorded, which is always a fun surprise. Seriously, I've had to start searching my own site, Google, and YouTube for videos before I start recording them. It happens a lot where I have a great idea for a video only to realize I recorded that video back in 2021. Sometimes, even I miss that I recorded it and Alex or one of the guys reminds me... after the new video is published. LOL.
(2) To be clear, I'm not picking on any one religion here. However, if this feels uncomfortably familiar, that might be worth examining rather than defending.
(3) Yes, I'm aware that the 2009 Star Trek movie fast-tracked Kirk from disgruntled enlistee to captain in what felt like a long weekend. Even I raised an eyebrow at that one. The movie was fun, but let's be honest, the writing took a few shortcuts through a wormhole. And don't even get me started on Michael Burnham, who managed to go from court-martialed convict to captain via what felt like a combination of emotional tear-filled speeches, and a very forgiving HR department. In reality, Starfleet careers look a lot more like Picard's slow, methodical climb. Experience takes time, whether Hollywood likes it or not.
