Posted by click aquí para leer este post en español
Happy 2025 Life Warriors! This is always our first article of the year, so if you’ve been following us for a while, it will be familiar to you. The beginning of the year, for various reasons, usually brings with it certain resolutions and objectives of various kinds, so we thought it would be a good idea to refresh some ideas on how to achieve all your goals.
We did it! If you’re reading this, 2024 is behind us and you’re starting a new adventure, ushering in a new year.
If you’re like most people, the New Year is a great time to make good resolutions and try to introduce some healthier lifestyle habits into your life: lose a few pounds, join the gym, get more sleep… The bad thing is that these good resolutions often disappear before the end of January.
There are several reasons why these good intentions have such a short life, but we could highlight the following:
- We want to introduce changes that are too radical, which reduces our adherence: we start overly restrictive diets that we are unable to maintain, we make the resolution to go to the gym every day, but we hate going to the gym… why not trying to workout at home?
- Our goals are about results (losing X kilos for example) and not about processes (controlling what we eat, being more active, etc.). There is nothing wrong with results-based goals… except that the results take a long time to arrive, which also reduces our adherence.
And what could we do to keep these goals for longer? The fact is that there are many things that can be done. Here is our foolproof recipe to make the old saying “new year, new life” come true.
- Assume that this is a life-changing event . Your current habits have gotten you to where you are now and you want to change, so adopting new habits and dropping them within three months will get you back to where you are now. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. What do you want your life to look like from now on?
- Replace outcome goals with process goals, this way you don’t have to wait three months to see results: a day in which you have met your two, three or four goals is a day achieved, a day in the green. Strive for longer and longer streaks of days in the green. Remember our founding manifesto: enjoy the journey and you will reach your destination sooner than you think.
- Approach it as a total change , and cover the 4 B’s that we talked about in our post about superpowers: Brain , Body , Business (work or studies) and Behaviors . We are not going to start with everything at once, but we do have to have objectives for each of the four.
- BRAIN: Our brain is the center of everything and the main tool we have to achieve our goals. It is essential that we take steps to take care of our brain health. Check out these articles we published in 2024:
- BODY: If the brain is the main tool to direct the change we want to make, the body is the vehicle to do it . If we have a broken car, we are not going to get very far with it, so let’s get it in good shape. Some of the articles we published in 2024 may be of help:
- If your goal is to lose weight, here is everything you need to know
- If you are looking to gain muscle, check out this article
- BUSINESS: Of course, work or studies are our main occupation and we dedicate a large percentage of our energy and effort to them. How can we improve in this? In this link you can see up to 10 different platforms in which to educate yourself.
- BEHAVIOR: As we said before, our current habits are what have brought us to where we are now and what we want to change. This means that there are things that I need to start doing (planning better, assigning new priorities, getting up earlier, measuring the things I do, keeping track…) things that I need to stop doing (improvising, postponing, uncontrolled screens…). Decide which of these things have the greatest impact on achieving your goals and add them to your plan. These articles that we published in 2024 may be useful to you:
This goal setting system is inspired by this fantastic video by Chase Hughes that we already referred to in our previous post. If you didn’t have a chance to watch it, here it is again
The Plan
How can we put all these pieces together? Step by step
Identify your goals for each of the 4 B’s
Choose just one or two of these goals; you can choose the ones that will be easiest for you to achieve or the ones that you think will have the greatest positive impact on your life.
Start your tracking. The goal is to get 80% of days in green. Once you have a streak of 21 days in green, add a new goal, and so on until you have them all. There’s no rush, make sure you have a goal in place before adding another.
Plan weekly. Not all weeks are the same: there are holidays, work trips, vacations… take a moment on Sunday afternoon to define when you can do each thing.
Here you can download a file to track your progress in a very visual way; it is designed so that you have a two-month view, although it is not very mysterious, you can also make your own to your liking.
We hope this content is useful and helps you achieve your goals. If so, please share it with other people you think it might help!