My 2025 Goals (and how I set them)
Right, now is the time for accountability (*sweats profusely).
You are about to read my goals for Q1 of 2025. These have been meticulously thought out, over-complicated, scribbled out, re-thought out, simplified and then finalised and agreed upon with myself.
I am posting these online for a couple of reasons:
It’s good content
To hold myself accountable
But before I reveal all, let me explain a little bit about my goal-setting process.
In my last post I spoke about my 2024 goals. And despite failing most of them, why exactly I still deem my 2024 a success. Whilst I was reviewing my year, and reading over the goals that I wrote down on January the 1st 2024, one thing jumped out at me - that is a sh*t load of goals to achieve in one year.
There was so much written down on this piece of paper, and although it all made sense, and every single one of the goals was something that would benefit my life, it was just too much. Not only that, but some of the goals I had not looked at for about 6 months, and obviously had not made any progress towards.
So for 2025 I decided that I was going to adjust the timeframe from 12 months, to 3 months. I was also going to narrow my focus i.e only set myself a few goals which I prioritise over everything else.
Image: Me interviewing Sho Dewan (Workhap) for an episode of Abnormal (my podcast) in a Space Pod in Hong Kong.
But even doing this was challenging! My original list got shortened by about 50% because (again) I had put too many things on it! So without further adieu, here are my goals for Q1 of 2025:
Personal
Pass a French exam, and immerse myself more in the language (phone settings, Netflix, YouTube all in French for example)
Professional
Reach 100,000 followers on Instagram
This is a big target. My process for this is to post on IG at least one time per day for 3 months.
Launch our first event of our new company
Finance (not showing official numbers on here)
Earn ‘X’ amount in revenue (IG, YouTube, Podcast, MC, Event Hosting etc.)
This number will not be anywhere near what I was getting paid at my old job, but the important thing is that I show traction and bring some momentum into the rest of 2025.
Health & Fitness
Run a sub-19 minute 5km time (current personal best 19 minutes and 19 seconds…a long time ago)
As you can see, there is quite a variety here! That is by design. None of these conflict one another. In fact, most of them actually support at least one other goal. For example, by posting at least once per day on my social platforms, I am likely to grow my audience towards the 100,000 goal, which in turn will make it more likely that brands will want to work with me to produce content for them, and hence contributing towards my revenue target.
Similarly, running a sub-19 minute 5km will help me learn French, as I will have more time in my training runs to listen to French podcasts…okay I may be pushing it a bit there, but you get the point. Each one of these has been carefully selected in an area of my life that is not going to interfere with another area of my life. Simple.
And by making it 3 months instead of 12 months, not only am I forcing myself to take action NOW, but I am also giving myself a chance to review and reset in 3 months time instead of waiting for 2026.
‘Now I have set my goals, how am I going to achieve them?’
The million dollar question. There is no point taking the time for goal-setting if you don’t also take the time to put a plan in place. I am not going to run a 19-minute 5km by going on a few casual jog’s a couple of times a week, I have outsourced the planning for this goal to professionals. I am using an app called ‘Runna’ (not an ad), to do all my programming for me. They tell me exactly what type of training I need to do in order to achieve my target in 3 months time.
It is this type of meticulous planning that I need to implement in the other areas of my life if I am going to have any chance of achieving them. I now have a content calendar that I am working on to keep myself at least a few days ahead in my posting schedule to ensure that I post at least once per day on my social channels. I have turned everything I possibly can (within reason) on my phone to french, I now know that ‘abonnés’ means ‘subscribers’!
My point is, goal-setting can be quite daunting, because as soon as you write it down failure becomes a real possibility. But that possibility becomes an absolute certainty if you do not put a plan in place to get there. That’s not to say that the plan will work! Oh no! There is no guarantee of that whatsoever! But it’s a thousand times better than no plan at all.
What are you waiting for?