Something that you do for 2+ years becomes your identity. If you are getting ready to find time to learn Italian, or failing to lose weight, or trying unsuccessfully to quit gambling, that becomes your identity. You become a person who fails at this thing you propose. And it becomes doubly difficult to achieve because now you not only have to do the thing itself but undo this whole identity you created around the failure and start a new identity-building process. The brain won’t relinquish the identity unless there’s another one to take its place. Even then it’s going to be hard because familiarity is very pleasing to the brain.
In short, you are wasting your time planning to learn, start, quit, etc if there’s no identity building happening previously.
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