【明報專訊】What is your New Year's resolution, if you have one? Personally, I have stopped making them because I believe that they are almost made to fail. The words ''New Year'' seem to suggest that it is temporary, a short but intense burst of effort. Moreover, there is often only one resolution, which confines you to a specific goal that you feel you can't change after you have set it. A resolution such as ''lose 15 pounds'' does nothing more than making you starve yourself for a few weeks only to regain the weight once that goal has been fleetingly achieved. A more sustainable goal would be to ''drink coffee without sugar'' or ''eat dessert no more than once a week''. Over the years, I have set out to learn new languages, learn how to code or read more books, and I have developed a few tricks to help me make progress. First and foremost, you have to make it a habit. You have to create a space and time in your daily routine where you can effortlessly squeeze that task in. When I decided to become fluent in English, I started reading news articles on my way home from school. Since I was reading the Guardian, much of it was British politics that thirteen-year-old me didn't understand, but that's okay; I tried my best to look up every word. Eventually, I became familiar with those once-alien words as they reappeared over and over again in the newspaper. Similarly, when I first started coding, I spent around 20 minutes (sometimes more) almost every day on a website called Codecademy. It wasn't a lot of time—I just had to finish a few exercises a day, which made it a rewarding and attainable goal. I knew for sure that I could finish my daily task, and so I did. I hope you succeed in your endeavors too, whatever they may be.