How To Actually Achieve Your Goals In 2025 (Full Guide)

Only about 8% of people actually achieve their goals. And I think it is because people are actually setting goals and not building systems. And when I shifted from just random goal setting, which is pretty much just like a wish list and that's why nobody achieves them, to actually breaking down where I want to be into actionable steps that I can do every single day and kind of holding myself accountable for that, that's when I started to achieve way more of my goal, like almost every goal that I've set, I've achieved this way. So this is the exact system that has absolutely revolutionized me achieving my goals. I've actually hit most of the goals that I've set. I just wanted to break it down to you as I'm setting my own goals for this next year and to show you exactly how I do it so that you can copy along. These are not full year goals. They are broken down into 90-day goals because for me, that's like enough progress where you can get a lot of stuff done, but it's not so long that you get burned out and you lose motivation and stuff. So hopefully if you follow along, you'll be able to achieve more in these next 90 days than you probably did in the last year if you actually follow through with this. To start off with, I'm going to be using this Finisher's journal because of some of the frameworks that it has. You can use a piece of paper. You can use something online. You don't need to pay for this. That being said, I've used this almost every single day for the past three or four years because I like it and for me, it's worth the time because I can't like, I don't want to write all this out. It's already done for me in the exact system that works. But before we get to that, I went to the last page of my last journal and I set some goals that I wanted to achieve by 30. I just turned 29. So the end of next year, I'm going to be 30 and these are some things that I wanted to get done. And this is actually an idea from the 12-week year, which is kind of some of the frameworks we're going to be using. But you want to think about where you want your life to be next year and it needs to be exciting enough that you get up out of bed, you change some habits, you do the hard things. It needs to be like kind of like pie in the sky, kind of crazy. It would be insane if that happened, but also not so crazy that it's unattainable because if you think about where you want your life to be in the next year, if it's exciting enough, you can make some real changes. So I don't like having too many goals. I have a few. I'm not going to share all of them with you, but one of them was to reach a million subscribers. It's taken me six years to get 600,000 subscribers and I think it would be really cool to get the next 400 in the next year. That in and of itself is not a great goal, but I'll break down how I actually turn that into something that seems reasonably almost weird if I don't achieve it. Next would be like buying our dream house, getting my shoulder fixed. It's been like over 10 years since that I've had shoulder problems. So actually getting that fixed and then some other goals like that. Again, I'm not going to break this down too much. Another way that you can do this is actually writing down what happened in the last year in future tense. So like my name is Gabe. I'm 30. I live in where I want to live next year in the new house. My net worth is X amount. My health is sub 10% BMI. My shoulder is fixed. I read 12 books in the last year on my faith and just things like that. Just like actually breaking down the person that you have become over the next year actually makes it much more likely for you to become that person if you take steps to get there. So I would start with that and then we'll get into actually writing down the goals. So we're doing smart goals here, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. If your goal doesn't fall under those categories, if you can't measure if you achieved it or not, if it doesn't have a time period when you need to achieve it by, there's almost no chance that it's going to happen. It's just a wish. Don't even bother. And I'm going to show you what that looks like in my own goals as I set them here. And on a side note, you want to avoid vague goals like grow my business, get in shape, get on a diet, weird stuff like that because there's no way that you can say it did or didn't happen. It's just very vague. So we're going to start off with a outcome goal. So for me over the next year, I need 400,000 subscribers. You break that down into three months and I need to hit 100,000 subscribers in the next 90 days. Now that's great, but I actually wanted to look at what did I do in the last 90 days. So I gained about 32,000 subscribers in the last 90 days and I can't expect doing what I'm currently doing to result in triple the amount of subscribers. It's not realistic. So I'm going to post two videos every week for the next 90 days. I've done one video a week for the past like five years. I'm going to experiment with what happens if I go to two videos a week. I think it should lead to actually more than double the results, but we'll find out. I'm also going to pick a time. I also need to time-bound this. So every Saturday at 10 a.m. and Thursday at 10 a.m. I'm going to post those videos. So I have time-bound when this needs to happen by. Then I'm going to shoot three videos every single week so that I can get ahead because if I'm like out for a week, then I'd need to shoot four different weeks. So I need to aim to shoot three videos a week. I'm going to think about how I could break that down further, but that's generally the steps is taking your year-long goal, breaking it down into 90 days, breaking it down into action steps to get there with deadlines of when you need to achieve them by. And while like the subscriber goal is not really the best one because I can't control that, I am going to control what I can control which is posting schedule and my own effort that I put into it and hopefully it'll lead to those results. This isn't the best goal honestly, but it's what I'm going with. And then it's good to think about your key motivation. So for me, this is kind of like a fountainhead goal where I know if my business does well, it'll lead to me having like a better life with my family. It'll lead to me being able to buy my dream house if I want to do that. It'll lead to me being able to travel more, pretty much everything else I want in my life will come from me achieving more in my business. Not everything I want, but like it's going to help. So that's kind of my key motivation. And then I'm going to continue to track progress as we progress here. So that's my beginning of this. By the way, if you guys want one of these journals, there's a link down below. It's got a discount. This is an affiliate. Like I said, I've absolutely loved them. So feel free to check them out, link down below. Next up, we're going to have a habit tracker. Now, I have not been moving at all for the past couple months and I'm actually going with the one that they already have in here, which is walk 5,000 steps a day and I can never miss two days in a row. Seems pretty attainable, won't take too much time and I need to really move during the winter, especially here. So I'm actually going to follow through with one that they already have started here and go ahead and start tracking this. So if you have a specific habit that you want, this is a great way to just see it every single day, check it off and you can see when you missed, when you hit and then if you aren't getting the results that you wanted and you look back and you've missed half the days. Well, it's like, okay. Well, there's no mystery of why you don't have the results that you want, you haven't put in the work. So we have the habit tracker. Then we're going to go into my first week plan. This is where things actually start to happen. So you have your priority of the week. I have another book on my shelf that is called The One Thing and like what is the one thing that if you complete, you will feel like your week was a success. And so for me, for this goal specifically and I'm going to go back and add in the other goals as well. If I shoot three videos this week, I will feel like my week was a success. Everything else is going to be things that lead to me achieving that goal or ones that lead to me achieving one of my other goals. I generally just like to have like one or two goals, like one in business and then one in like personal. That way I make meaningful progress on those two things. And if I have like five goals, I never achieve any of them. So I try to keep it simple, but that would mean that we're going to script two hours a day on Monday and Wednesday. We're going to build a month schedule so that I know what I'm going to be scripting and like what I'm on track for. We're going to plan out the week and what things should happen on what days so that I make sure that I'm making progress. We're going to brick my phone at least five hours a day to make sure that I don't get distracted because that's the main thing that keeps me from achieving most of my goals is my phone. Once we have the plan, I'm going to write down what the three videos are so that I can have that better planned next week. So next week I should hopefully have a better plan of knowing I'm going to shoot this video, this video, and this video, not just a blanket three because the more specific I can get this, the more I'll know if I hit it or not. And then as I actually get to the day, I won't make you watch this, but I'm going to go through and I'm going to plan out every single day of next week so that I know my most important task, the secondary task. And again, I just like to have one thing that if I get this one thing done today, I will feel like my day was a success. Like today it is shooting this video. If I get this video shot, these things planned for myself, then I will feel like this day was a success, no matter what else happens. And so finding that and then actually scheduling things out for the entire week on paper makes me way more likely to happen. For some reason, when I tried scheduling things online, I never actually do them. When they're written down on paper and I see them every morning, I actually physically write them out. I hit a lot of these things a lot better. And then once I do finish up the week, I'm going to kind of review it a little bit, find out what worked, what did not work, so that I can not do the things that didn't work and do more of the things that did work. And then, you know, kind of figure out how I'm going to improve, go back, see how much progress that I made, put it into the tracker and then plan out my next week. And that is my general thing where I'm always going back to my initial goal and seeing if what I'm doing this week is still leading back to that goal or if I got distracted. And that way I can stay focused for a long period of time. So again, if you guys do want to check out one of these journals, there'll be a link down below with a discount. I absolutely love them. I've got enough of them for the year right now so that I can just kind of seamlessly go from the last one into this one and into the next one. Because for me, this is the system that I found worked best. I've tried a bunch of different ones. Again, you can do, you can use paper, you can use whatever. But I really like these. So check them out, finish your journal. And yeah, hopefully this was helpful for you as you plan your year. Catch you in a couple of months when I hit 700K. Hopefully, we'll see what happens.