The First Step Is Not a Masterpiece: Rossini and the Fresh Start Effect

On 3 November 1810, at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice, a one-act farce was staged: “La cambiale di matrimonio” (The Marriage Contract). The music was by an eighteen-year-old, Gioachino Rossini. It was not the first opera he had written, but it was the first one staged in a professional theatre. The success was modest, without a fuss. Yet it was enough to get going: in the following years, up to 1813, Rossini wrote four more farces for the same theatre and his name began to travel across Italy and Europe.

The first step, in short, was not a masterpiece: it was a beginning. But why is starting so often hard? Research suggests looking at the calendar too.

In 2014 Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis published in Management Science three studies on archival data, to test whether people become more active right after certain symbolic moments. They looked at Google searches for the word “diet”, gym visits and commitments to pursue a goal.

In all three cases the numbers rose after “temporal landmarks”: the start of a new week, month, year or semester, a birthday, a holiday. The authors call this the “fresh start effect”. Their explanation: these moments mark the passage of time and create many new “mental accounting periods”, which relegate past imperfections to an earlier period, make people take a big-picture view of their lives and give momentum to aspirational behaviour.

A few cautions. These are archival data: they show that fresh starts go together with more action, not that a date alone is enough to change. I read the abstract and not the full paper, so I cannot say how long the effect lasts. And the study is about people in general, not about Rossini: we know about his debut from theatre chronicles, not from a study.

What can we do with it? These are our own common-sense ideas, not findings of the study. We are in the first days of a new month: pick one small thing you have been putting off and give it a starting day, perhaps next Monday. When you begin, keep it small: even ten minutes are enough to get something going. And do not wait for it to be perfect: Rossini's first step was a one-act farce, not “The Barber of Seville”.

And you, what is the thing you have been postponing for a while and will give a start this week? Tell us in the comments: sometimes saying it out loud helps get things moving.

Sources

• Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., Riis, J. (2014), “The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior”, Management Science. DOI 10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
• “La cambiale di matrimonio”, Italian Wikipedia entry (accessed 31 October 2026)