Dear Maggie,

I don’t know what good New Year’s Resolutions do anyone! I seem to make the same ones every year, and every year I break them all. I’ve already blown it and it’s only the first week of 2010. If there’s a way to make this work, I haven’t found it. Have you?

Signed,

Resolved to Fail

Dear Resolved,

You, my friend, are a self-fulfilling prophecy. You stated your main problem in your own signature. Resolve to Fail. You’ve already decided you won’t succeed, and by doing so, have made it your own success impossible.

You say you haven’t found the way to make resolutions work, but it sounds like you’ve only tried one way. Making them, breaking them, and giving up until next year. If you keep doing things the same way, how can you expect the results to be different?