How I'm setting goals for the new year

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. 

Statistically speaking, they never really stick, and they always seem to be tough to quantity and fairly limited in scope. 

I do, however, set goals at the beginning of every calendar year. 

I first started writing down my goals in 2007, the year I graduated from college, though, hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had started doing it sooner. 

Getting married, playing drums in arenas, and starting my own business were all things I wrote down as goals in my twenties. 

Fast forward to today, and I’ve accomplished them all. 

That’s no accident. 

Of course, there are plenty of goals I have yet to accomplish, and there have been even more added over time as I’ve grown and my life has evolved. 

Regardless of the season though, I’ve stuck to a simple framework for outlining and pursuing my goals each year. 

Here’s how I think about it. 

Every goal has its place 

I break my goals down into seven primary categories: career, family, financial, health, intellectual, social, and spiritual. 

Each of these seven categories contains a combination of short-term goals (read: this year) and long-term goals (read: open-ended). 

But more on that later. 

For context, here are some examples of some of my past goals in each of these categories: 

Career - tour on a bus and play arenas ✅ 

Family - get married and have kids ✅ 

Financial - own my own home ✅ 

Health - Earn a black belt in taekwondo ✅ (my thinking here was that improved health would inevitably be downstream of a consistent exercise regimen—I was correct) 

Intellectual - read 50 books in one year ✅ 

Social - go on a hunting trip with my friends ✅ (nothing creates camaraderie for men like being in the wilderness on a shared mission of finding food)

Spiritual - find a church home for my family ✅ 

If you look closely, you’ll notice that all of these goals are quantifiable in some way. There is a clear point of victory, of having “done the thing”. 

For me, this is important. I have to be able to check the box with complete clarity. 

And I do love to check a good box. 

🤓 

Short-term vs. long-term goals 

Every year I set goals to be met within the next 12 months. 

But, Tom, some goals require a longer timeline. What about those? 

Great question. 

Within each of these seven categories, I have two sections—goals for this year and ongoing, or open-ended, goals. 

When I was 22, I might have had the goal of joining a band that year (I’m pretty sure this was an actual goal of mine at the time), but I also knew I wanted to perform at the highest level of music and I viewed touring on a bus and playing arenas as the metric for measuring that. 

I believed I could get there but just didn’t know how long it would take, so that became a long-term goal. 

In my mind, short-term goals are things whose outcome I can realistically control within a limited window of time, whereas long-term goals are those I know I want to accomplish but can’t dictate a deadline for. 

Either way though, they are, again, quantifiable. 

Because you can believe the first time I set foot on a tour bus I checked a box. 

Mission accomplished. 

Focusing on inputs instead of outputs 

No matter the timespan of my goals, short-term or long-term, my effort has always been to focus on the inputs, not the outputs. 

What does that mean?

Well, I could set a goal of hitting 100,000 subscribers on YouTube (something I’d certainly like to achieve one day), but I can’t reasonably make that happen with any semblance of control (let alone dictate when it happens). 

What I can control is the quality of the content I post and how frequently I do it, so setting a goal of publishing, say, 50 videos per year is a more realistic metric to pursue. 

In my mind, growth on YouTube is sure to follow consistently posting high-quality content. 

And it certainly has thus far—simply posting content is what has already taken my channel from zero to over 20,000 subscribers. 

Sidenote: if you’re one of those 20,000, thank you. We’re just getting started! 

If you have something you want to achieve in this life, I highly recommend you ditch the resolutions and instead take a goal-oriented approach. 

Oh, and write it down!

I can’t stress that enough. You have to write it down. 

I also recommend reading your goals aloud regularly. 

Like a crazy person, I read my goals aloud every Monday morning when I get to work. It may sound ridiculous, but I honestly don’t care. 

That’s 52 times per year I hear myself say, out loud, in full detail, what I want out of life. 

Take it from someone who has been doing this for almost 20 years. 

It works.