Advice to want it more has a poor record. Approaches that alter cues, defaults and friction tend to work better, and the reason lies in how routine behaviour is actually produced.
Deliberate control competes with everything else
Conscious self-direction is engaged whenever a person is deciding, resisting or planning, and it is the same capacity being used across all of those demands.
A day full of decisions therefore leaves less capacity for the evening intention, which is why plans tend to fail at predictable times rather than randomly.
Treating this as a character problem misreads it. The failure follows a pattern related to load, fatigue and competing demand rather than to sincerity.
Habits are triggered rather than chosen
A well-established habit begins from a cue in the environment or the sequence of the day, and it runs with little deliberation once started.
That is what makes habits efficient and also what makes them hard to change by argument. Persuasion operates on the deliberate system while the behaviour is being launched by the cue.
Changing behaviour therefore often means changing what is encountered rather than changing what is believed about it.
Friction determines what actually happens
Small increases in effort reliably reduce a behaviour, and small decreases reliably increase it, often out of proportion to the size of the change.
Placing equipment where it is used, removing an application from a home screen, or preparing something the night before all work through this mechanism.
The adjustments look trivial, which is part of why they are neglected. Their effect comes from acting at the moment of initiation rather than at the moment of intention.
Specific plans beat general resolutions
A resolution to exercise more leaves the decision to be made repeatedly, each time under whatever conditions happen to apply.
A plan naming the time, the place and the trigger converts that into a single decision made in advance, so the later moment requires recognition rather than deliberation.
The same structure helps with avoidance, where deciding in advance what to do when a cue appears is more effective than intending to resist it.
Repetition, not motivation, is what consolidates
Habits form through repeated performance in a stable context, and the time required varies widely between people and behaviours.
Missing occasionally does not undo the process, which matters because an all-or-nothing framing turns a single lapse into an abandoned attempt.
Motivation still matters for starting and for choosing what to build, but it is unreliable as the thing carrying a behaviour through the months when it is becoming automatic.