How to always achieve your goals

Farewell to New Year's resolutions

Mar 21, 2024

“What are your goals for 2024?”

It’s a few weeks into the new year and I’m catching up with a friend I haven’t seen in months when she asks this entirely reasonable question. Still, it catches me off guard and I find myself without an answer.

“I don’t know. I haven’t set New Year’s resolutions in ages,” I reply truthfully.

“Me neither,” she agrees.

And there our conversation might have moved on, but for the answer that suddenly drops into my head.

“I guess it’s to write more.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, my goal in 2024 is to write more...” I pause to consider this revelation and, finding it satisfactory, conclude with a smile: “That’s it, that’s my goal.”

Why resolutions fail

My guess is that all of us, at some point in time, have set ourselves a New Year’s resolution or two. Maybe we were eight and dead set on getting dad to buy us the latest video game craze. Or fifteen and desperate to have our first kiss. Or eighteen and worried about getting into a good university. Or twenty-five and eager to snag our first promotion. Or forty and failing to lose the weight we’ve been carrying since our mid-30s. Or sixty and determined to make something of our retirement.

I’ve set plenty of New Year’s resolutions myself. Most of them a variation of “I want to no longer be chubby.” But considering I gave up on resolutions years before I finally got lean, it’s evident they never amounted to much.

Here’s my utterly unscientific (but hopefully still enlightening) theory as to why resolutions fail:

Resolutions fail because they focus on the end result, not what’s required to get there.

When you resolve to lose ten kilograms, your mind is on that one number you hope to shed one day. It’s not on the early-morning gym sessions three times a week you’ll have to get up for, or the smaller portions you must limit yourself to at every meal, or all the beers you won’t be able to drink when out socialising with friends—the things that will actually make that one day a reality.

End results are sexy. It’s gratifying to picture your flat-bellied self rocking that bikini “by the summer,” to visualise that car you’ll buy once you get that big raise “by Q2,” to imagine all the intricate tunes you’ll play on whatever instrument you’ve decided to master “by the end of the year.”

What’s not sexy is the daily grind in the gym and the countless food abstentions, the urgent deadlines you have to meet to merit that raise, all those inevitable months you’ll spend butchering basic tunes as you attempt to learn an instrument from scratch.

When New Year’s resolutions are set, we feel galvanised by the sexy end results we envisage. But as soon as we get to work and encounter all the unsexy obstacles we have to overcome to get there, we lose heart.

Which is why, by the end of February, we’ve stopped going to the gym, we’re back to browsing Facebook when the boss isn’t watching, and our shiny new instrument sits gathering dust in a corner.

Goals as actions, not outcomes

For reasons I’ll one day unpack in a therapy session or ten, the past decade of my life has seen me shift my focus from end results to actions. I talk about this in my 2020 application for my dream job, in response to the question “What are your career goals?”:

I used to have a career goal. My ambition from university days was to land a top job at Boston Consulting Group, which led to an unsuccessful internship application and much daydreaming. But then, life happened. 4 depressive episodes, 1 manic, 1.5 month in a mental hospital and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder later, I came to adopt a different life approach. Out went the career goals of old, in came a focus on the process. I became a firm believer that life happens on the journey, not at the destination—it’s not so important where you end up; what matters is the stuff along the way. So, instead of career goals, I now have one guiding principle for my process of life: maximize the time I spend doing what I love. Or, as you might say, choose my suffering and suffer the hell out of it.

Aside from netting me that dream job, this focus on journey over destination—action over end result—now informs everything I do. When making friends in a new city, I don’t think of the friendship I may (or may not) end up with; I just focus on the coffee/meal I’m going to have with that person. When I sign up to a one-year gym membership, I don’t think of the chiselled body I’ll have at the end; I think of the 9am classes I’ll be waking up for three times a week.

Which is why I stopped setting New Year’s resolutions. To me, it no longer makes sense to resolve to somehow make a dream of mine come true by year end. Far better to resolve to do all the unsexy things I know I have to do but don’t really want to do—take “write more” for an example.

I love writing. I don’t love the pristine blank page on days when words refuse to come and every sentence has to be dragged kicking and screaming from my brain. I don’t love the endless revisions that more often than not consist of me changing a single word a dozen times. I don’t love the seven hours of writing a week I have to do on top of my full-time job to keep this weekly newsletter going at the standard you’ve come to expect.

But “writing” is the only unsexy thing that can make all my wildest, sexiest dreams come true—living comfortably off passive income from Val Thinks, becoming a New York Times bestselling author.

And so “writing” is my goal for 2024. Not getting 500 subscribers to my newsletter, nor finishing the first draft of my memoir. Those are nice-to-have end results, but they’re not what matters.

The writing is where the magic happens. Which makes the act of writing—not any end result that it may or may not lead to—the only goal worth setting.

What do you think?

If you find my approach to goals ponderous, consider this: if all your goals are actions, then all you ever have to do to achieve them all is to—in the wise words of Nike—just do it.

What are your 2024 goals?

Not what you want to achieve, but what you actually want to do in 2024. Give me a list as long as your heart desires. Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. If you want, share this with someone who sets inspiring goals and doesn’t balk at the unsexy actions required to achieve them.