New Year, New Goals: 7 Science-Based Practices to Set and Achieve Goals in 2025

Make 2025 Your Best Year

This is The Curious Mind, by Álvaro Muñiz: a newsletter where you will learn about technical topics in an easy way, from decision-making to personal finance.

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How do we turn goals into reality?

Goal setting and goal pursuit are at the heart of personal growth, yet most of us fail to our commitments year after year. More often than not, it is not that we don’t want the outcome enough but that we lack proper methods to set and achieve our goals. Today, we will learn science-backed protocols, as explained by neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, to turn our ambitions into actionable steps.

Ready to make 2025 count? Let’s dive in.

Source: ChatGPT

Today in a Nutshell

• The science of goals has two parts: goal setting and goal pursuit.

• Goal setting deals with how to define a good goal: the choice of a goal, its formulation and the plan to achieve it.

• Goal pursuit deals with how to work on our goal: tools and protocols to gain and maintain motivation.

• 3 tools for goal setting: (1) Single & Ambitious (2) Definition (3) Measurability

• 4 tools for goal pursuit: (1) Visualisation (2) Visual Focus (3) Divide & Conquer & (4) Random Intermittent Reinforcement

Step 1: Goal Setting

Before you even try to pursuit and achieve a goal, you need to set your goal.

This is the part when you sit down and write something like “My goal for 2025 is to get in shape” (as we will see, this is not a good way to set a goal). To choose a goal, there are two things you should do:

• Focus on a single goal.

• Choose a goal that is ambitious.

On a given year you will be able to achieve many goals, but it is good practice to focus on one goal at a time. This will allow you to put all your attention on that specific goal, avoiding a feeling of overwhelm.

As for the level of your goal, it should aim slightly beyond what you think is achievable. A goal that is too easy won’t motivate you enough; if it is too hard you will see at as impossible and not even try. A challenging, but yet realistic goal will help you stay motivated.

Tool 1 (Single & Ambitious): focus on a single, ambitious goal.

Defining the Goal

Now that you have an idea of the type of goal you want to pursue, it is essential that you are very precise about what your goal exactly is.

For example, consider the following two goals:

1. Goal 1: In 2025 I will get in shape.

2. Goal 2: In 2025 I will gain 5kg of muscle mass, decrease my body fat percentage from 25% to 15% and be able to run, with no stops, for 30 minutes.

Both goals relate to improving one’s physical condition, but the specificity is completely different. When you set Goal 1 as your goal, what do you mean by “getting in shape”? How much in shape do you want to get? How can you measure if you are making progress, and how far along you are?

When you define your goal, it should have a clear end—a measurable, specific moment when the goal can be marked as achieved.

Tool 2 (Definition): be as precise as possible when defining your goal.

Measurability

Now that you have a clearly defined goal, the next thing is to be very specific about the actions you will take to achieve your goal.

Most people define a goal and stop there. The result? Days go by and they make no progress. Even if you really wanted to achieve your goal, it does not come naturally at the beginning to remember it on a daily basis, or to find time during your day to work on it.

When you set a new goal, it is crucial to pin down:

1. Goal length: how long you will pursuit the goal.

2. Weekly or daily commitment: how much time, at what precise moment and where you will work on your goal.

Goal Length. It is advisable that, if possible, you break your goal down into smaller goals that can be achieved in about 12 weeks (~3 months). If you are able to achieve the goal (or a subgoal) in a shorter time, then you can just mark it as complete early and move to the next goal.

Commitment. As for the second point, you want to be very specific about the actions you will take and the time and place when they will occur. Here is a bad and a good example about how to do this for our goal “In 2025, I will get in shape”:

• To achieve my goal, I will workout several times per week.

• To achieve my goal, I will go to the gym Monday, Wednesday and Friday just before lunch and follow strength-training routine X, for a minimum of 45 minutes. I will also go running every Sunday, increasing my run duration by 1 minute each week.

When you formulate your objective in the second way and it is Monday, you know exactly what you have to do. You don’t have to think at that moment—when you might be tired or demotivated—what you should do to get in shape, whether to workout now or later in the day, at home or in the gym, or whether to run or lift weights. You wrote down Monday before lunch because you knew you would have time to workout then, and you know that today it is strength-training day.

It is much easier to do it. You have a plan.¹

Tool 3 (Measurability): be very precise with the actions, time and place to pursue your goal.

Other tips

• Designate smaller outcomes (“checkpoints”) during the 12 week period (or whatever goal length you have set) to evaluate your progress.

• Write the goal and actions on paper rather than on a computer. Apparently, there are neurocircuits associated with typing that are different to those from handwriting.

Step 2: Goal Pursuit

Now you have a clearly defined goal, as well as a clearly defined set of actions (with times and locations) to achieve your goal.

The next question is: how do we start moving and stay motivated until we achieve our goal?

Motivation I—Before and Between Sessions

The first type of motivation is the one we need before and between working sessions.

First thing, ask yourself the following question: “Am I motivated to pursue my goal? Do I want to take action right now?”.

• If the answer is yes, spend 3-5 minutes visualising success: the potential positive outcomes and the way you will feel if you achieve your goal.

• If the answer is no, spend 3-5 minutes visualising failure: how bad you will feel if you don’t achieve your goal.

I found the second protocol very shocking, but there is science supporting it (see the References below).

Tool 4 (Visualisation): visualise success (if you are motivated) or failure (if not).

Motivation II—During Sessions

The second type of motivation is the one we need during the working sessions.

A very easy protocol that is backed up by science is based on visual focus. Our cognitive, bodily and mental state of readiness is powerfully anchored on our visual system. Here is something you can do (I do it often, and it works!):

Tool 5 (Visual Focus): If you are losing motivation during a working session, narrowly focus your attention on a visual target (like the screen in front of you or the weights in the gym) and actively work to maintain focus there for 30-90s.

Another important barrier to goal pursuit is the so-called middle problem. This is the phenomenon by which we have motivation at the start and end of our goal or working session, but experience a drop in the middle. To work around this:

1. Be aware that this is normal.

2. Make the middle bout a separate thing on its own and divide it into 3-4 chunks.

For instance, if you usually feel a drop in motivation during the middle 20 minutes of your workout, set a 5 minute timer and think of the 20 minutes as 4 short 5-minute sprints.

Tool 6 (Divide & Conquer): divide the middle session into smaller chunks.

Reward

Lastly, what about reward?

Should you treat yourself and watch your favourite Netflix show each time you go to the gym? Should you never do it? How often?

This has to do with the famous molecule dopamine: the molecule of motivation and reward. Think about the most addictive things nowadays, like social media. If every time you opened Instagram there was something interesting going on, the potency of the reward would diminish overtime. On the other side, if there was never nothing going on, you would stop opening Instagram.

Instead, sometimes you open Instagram and there are new interesting things, others there is not much going on. The key to get you hooked is an intermittent reward: you don’t know when it’s coming. It is the same method that casinos use, giving out prizes at random times.

You want to apply the same to yourself:

Tool 7 (Random Intermittent Reinforcement): randomly reward yourself for completing milestones.

This could be something as simple as flipping a coin, and treating yourself if heads comes.

Other tips

• Daily practices potentially unrelated to your habit, like nutrition and sleep, heavily influence how you show up to work on your goals. Take care of these!

• Research on circadian rhythms shows that most people will focus best 30 minutes, 3 hours and 11 hours after waking up. Don’t consider this as a rule though: the most important thing is performing the goal, not when!

• Stickers don’t work. Your brain gets used to the sticker being there and starts ignoring it. If you want them to be effective, change the content and the location of the sticker on a daily basis.

• Put your phone away! I usually leave my phone in another room or turn it off and put it in my backpack when I am about to start a working session. If things get hard during your working session, your brain will try to avoid the difficult thing—you don’t want to have a source of immediate, easy reward and dopamine to boycott your session.

Summary

How to Set Your Goal

1. Set a single, ambitious goal.

2. Be as precise as possible when defining your goal. It should have a clear end.

3. Be as precise as possible with the actions, time and place to pursue your goal.

How to Pursue Your Goal

1. Visualise success (if motivated) or failure (if not) before and between working sessions.

2. Focus your visual attention on a narrow point to increase motivation and focus during working session.

3. Divide the middle part of your working session into smaller chunks.

4. Randomly reward yourself for completing your working sessions and milestones.

References

I learnt most of the things in this post from Dr. Andrew Huberman.

In case you don’t know him, he is a neuroscientist and podcaster at Huberman Lab—by far, my favourite science outreach podcast. In particular, he talks about goal setting and goal pursuit in the following episodes:

• The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

• Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals

Check him out!

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1. Needless to say, you can (and should) adapt your plan as you progress. The important thing is to always have a plan that removes the friction to start your actions.