The evidence is there and it's not good. Most people break their New Year's resolutions. On average, people hold out 'til January 19, apparently although about 8% of people manage to abide by their self imposed strictures for a year or more. We make New Year's resolutions because there's bits of us we don't like and because we fall for one of the most common misperceptions that people have about themselves: that our failings are just a matter of will power and that if only we had a bit of discipline we could all smarten our individual and corporate acts up. Bah humbug, I say. There's a French saying, tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner . To understand all is to forgive all. This is profoundly true. Pretty much everything we do, we do for a reason. What trips us up is that a) our reasoning is faulty, based as it is on inaccurate premises and incomplete information and b) our reasoning is usually completely invisible to us. So we notice that we