2025 Goals

Some things I’m aiming at this year

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As a lot of people do, I think more about bigger picture goals around the start of the new year. This year I started with some high-level goals, which I have been refining into more concrete plans over the last couple months.

I figured I could benefit from writing out those goals and plans here, both as a sort of declaration of intent (and a commitment pact, like “Unlaunching” was) and as a space to reflect.

Here are the goals I’m reaching for this year, and specific things I’m doing to reach for them:

Be physically healthier

  1. Minimize my intake of refined sugar. I’ve done this by setting strict rules for what sugar I will eat, including dark chocolate (at most one square per day), ice cream (at most once per calendar month, and only on a date with my wife), and dried fruit (as much as I want, provided it’s unsweetened). It’s been helpful to have precise ways in which I can enjoy sugar without giving myself license to eat whatever I want (which did not mix well with working from home, since I would tend to eat whatever sugary snackable foods I could find).

  2. Move more. I’ve implemented this by getting a treadmill base for my standing desk. Last December, when I decided to do this, I set up a step-tracking app on my phone, so that I could monitor my step counts before and after getting the treadmill base.

    I also have been tracking in my notes how many hours I walk each day, which has been very helpful. As author Gretchen Rubin writes in Better Than Before: “Self-measurement brings self-awareness, and self-awareness strengthens our self-control.”

Be mentally healthier

  1. No app-building. I wrote about the downsides of how app-building interacts with my mind in my post “Unlaunching”—and then, about a month later, proceeded to get briefly swept up in a new app idea. So I decided, with some guidance from the Lord through personal revelation, to set a bright-line rule for myself: no app-building this year. I’m not necessarily ruling out app-building in the future, but for now I want to (1) be more present in my family life, especially as my one-year-old daughter is going through such a fun stage (she’s been learning to walk over the last couple weeks!) and (2) write more, especially for Innerhelm. (I discussed both these things in “Unlaunching”.)
  2. Write more. This is one I’ve found hard to make quantitative in a comprehensive way. My writing has several facets, including my journaling, my scripture study notes, my notes on my reading and research for Innerhelm, my public writing here, and my public writing for Innerhelm. Each of those facets is important to me for different reasons, and, to be frank, each of them is at present quite lacking in output. But one sub-goal that I’ve decided on is to write eight blog posts on Innerhelm—each of which should be a 3 on my writing-thoroughness scale. (My writing here is often well-suited to being only a 1 or a 2.)
  3. Read more. Right now, my goal here is to read at least one book a month, though I might increase this as I find a better rhythm for fitting reading into my schedule. I’m considering turning my highlights from these books into highlights-reel-style overviews (like Nick Wignall did with Anthony de Mello’s Awareness), and publishing them on Innerhelm. (At present I’m working my way through Thoreau’s Walden, which I highly recommend.) I also want to finish all the in-progress books on my list (there are several).

Stretch in new ways

  1. Write more. The above goal about writing also applies to this category—writing eight level-three posts in a single year is substantially more than I’ve written before.
  2. Become conversant in Spanish. This one has been very hard to come up with a good system for. I’ve got the foundations of Spanish in place fairly well—I can typically understand most of what my wife says when talking to her Spanish-speaking friends, for example. But I’m having a hard time developing my ability to formulate sentences at conversational speed. I think I could do it with minimal difficulty if I could live in a Spanish-speaking place for a month or two—immersion learning is a powerful way to learn a language. But that’s not really in the cards at the moment, and as such I’m having a hard time creating a good plan to tackle this one.

Be self-compassionate

With the strict rules and monitoring setups I’m using for the above goals, I’m reminding myself that I need to be extremely self-compassionate. So I’m not labeling myself a worse person if I fail to hit a given standard (such as eating sugary foods that weren’t on my allowlist over Valentine’s weekend), and I’m not subjecting myself to the tool of psychological torture that is a don’t-break-the-chain streak count (the downsides of which I have written about before). My goal is rather to keep my standards from dropping over time, even though I intermittently fail to hit them, and monitor the results, so I can see my progress and thus increase my intrinsic motivations of autonomy and competence.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I’ll do an additional write-up at the end of the year that reflects on how this went, and perhaps reflect back on this in my writing over the course of the year as well.

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