I typically spend the final weeks of December reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the year to come, a process I have written about a few times on this site. Here is an example from 2020 if you’re curious.
While it can be difficult to prioritize self-reflection during holiday celebrations and lazy days with family, the exercise has helped me replace scattered, anxious thoughts about what I wish I had done with a focused vision of how I want to transition from one year to the next.
As I wrote in 2021:
The exercise ties a very neat bow on a year gone by and makes it easy to move onto the next one. It captures the highlights of a small chunk of my life and lets me pause, take a deep breath and get started on a clean slate. Imagine a rest stop on a very long road trip. Or a big, red reset button.
Historically, my goals for the coming year have centered on developing new habits or maintaining existing ones, which I’ve tackled in three ways:
- Set an ambitious annual target and record progress throughout the year (i.e. run 1,500 miles)
- Choose a tentpole event to look forward to (i.e. Philly Marathon)
- Spread the word to friends and family
This strategy has proven to be effective at building new habits, whether or not I accomplish the original goal. For example, one of my goals in 2023 was to do 30 pull-ups in a row by my 30th birthday. Despite falling far short – I still haven’t achieved it two years later – the focused goal helped me to develop a gym routine that I have sustained to this day, something I had previously failed to do with a less specific objective.
Additionally, the gamification of existing behaviors – with things like volunteer hour totals – has helped me remain consistent over a number of years. Even with the best intentions, it is easy to sleep in on a Saturday morning rather than volunteering at the Meatloaf Kitchen. But I’ve been much more likely to go when I know that skipping means a blank row in my tracker and a painful scramble to make up the hours later.
At a certain point, however, such a tactical approach becomes self-defeating when the goal distracts from the behavior I’m trying to encourage. I learned this the hard way in 2021, when I binge-read my way through the final weeks of December in a failed attempt to hit an arbitrary reading target. Rather than just enjoy what I was reading at the time, I made myself miserable speed-reading through multiple books, all in the name of “accomplishing” something nobody cared about. And still I fell short!
Reflecting on this past year, the biggest change has come from finding a better balance between these self-imposed pressures and simply living my life.
No race training – just one leisurely ten-mile run on Sundays.
No consistent newsletter – just journaling and writing when inspiration strikes.
No volunteering goal – just being a part of the Meatloaf Kitchen community.
Not surprisingly, I continued to do what I enjoy absent the more rigid goal-setting, and in some cases freed up space for different types of achievements. For example, I finally read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a dense book that took me two months to read, and which I previously would have seen as “costing me” eight books towards my goal in the bizarre logic of numerical targets.
Most importantly, I left myself space to shift my focus towards more of what felt right in the moment, which with Anne pregnant meant more TV, long walks and doing nothing. That turned out to be the absolute best use of my time, and something I would have had more difficulty prioritizing with a number of lofty goals hanging over my head.
Don’t get me wrong – I am still an advocate for the goal-setting approach I have used since 2018, particularly for changing habits. Nothing beats specific, measurable goals, with accompanying accountability, for developing better sleep, healthier eating or a new exercise routine.
But one thing that self-improvement leaves very little room for is just living, a lesson it has taken me far too long to learn.
That is not an excuse to accept self-defeating behaviors that we want and need to change. Instead, it’s a reminder that goals should be used surgically – get in, make the change, and get out. Eventually, they stop serving a purpose. Once I became the type of person who was self-motivated to lace up my shoes and go for a run, holding myself to annual mileage totals could only detract from the joy I took from the activity.
Looking back, the most significant decisions I have made in my adult life – the ones that have led to true personal growth – have all come from seizing inspiration, not from pre-meditated planning.
I went for my first run in January 2016 because I was hungover and it was unseasonably warm.
I started writing because the pandemic had freed up an hour of daily commute time.
I went to back to church because I started reading an old copy of the Bible.
Had I left no room for change I would have missed out on all three – but had I not taken a methodical approach to habit-building once inspiration struck, I doubt I would still being doing any of them today.
It seems clear that there is no perfect solution – we need to apply focused pressure in order to grow, but apply too much and that growth comes at the expense of our daily lives.
That is why continual reflection is so important. It allows us to recalibrate when the scale starts to tip. If this past year was dominated by a self-limiting behavior, then maybe it’s time to apply more methodical pressure to the problem. And if this past year was dominated by too much pressure, maybe it’s time to take our foot off the gas.
Maintaining that balance, particularly as I adjust to my first year of fatherhood, is where I am focusing my time and energy in 2025.
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
The Most Important Question of Your Life – Mark Manson
“Because if you want the benefits of something in life, you have to also want the costs. If you want the beach body, you have to want the sweat, the soreness, the early mornings, and the hunger pangs. If you want the yacht, you have to also want the late nights, the risky business moves, and the possibility of pissing off one person or ten thousand.”
The Invisible Man – Patrick Fealey
“The toughest parts of homelessness have been surviving the poverty and the marginalization, discrimination, and hostility from the non-homeless population. It’s usually subtle, this hostility. People pull in to visit the lighthouse or the beach or wherever I am, see me, and immediately park somewhere else. All day long.”
What I’m Listening To:
Tony Robbins on Achievement Versus Fulfillment – Tim Ferriss Show
“The guy says, hey, man, God, this is so incredible. This is the most beautiful place I could ever imagine. The sky, the air, the water. Oh my God there’s so many different people that challenge me and help me to grow and learn and people I can love. And oh my God you even created these red ants. I mean, these red ants are so tiny. I’m 1,000 times their size and they’re so courageous. They come even bite me. It’s cool what you’ve created here. Who do you want to hang with?”