Did you set yourself up for failure in 2025

By setting the wrong goal to aim at?

How do I hit the goal?

Goal setting is an interesting game on its own.

It’s a skill and an art. Set the right goal and you pull yourself towards your highest potential. Pick the wrong goal and you set yourself up for failure and the negative fallout that comes with an improperly aimed life.

You see this all time with fitness, especially around the new years. People set ‘resolutions’ to finally get fit and healthy, but they quit after a few weeks. Rather than see this as motivation or disciple problem, it’s better to see this as a ‘miscalibrated aim’ problem. They went after the wrong goal from the start, they never had a chance.

When it comes to setting your own fitness or sports goals for the next year, how should you approach responsibly approach them?

Let me take you inside my own goal setting process to give you a sense of what I believe works best in both locating the proper goal and connecting it to your larger process.

This year I have 1 big athletic goal:

Run 100 miles in 2 races, with 2 different race formats. Here’s how I think about setting it.

Aim true FIRST

The great philosopher Aristotle advises us to focus on aim over everything when determining the course of our life. Get the aim wrong, and the goals you hit along the way don’t matter. But fail to use a goal as your aim and you have no direction to progress along. Quite the paradox. Good.

These three ancient quotes from the man known simply as ‘The Philosopher’ help us understand how to live with this seeming contradiction.

“Life is only meaningful when we are striving for a goal”

“Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.”

“Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances.”

You need a goal. It’s how you aim yourself properly. And that goal MUST BE BIG. It must orient you towards excellence. It needs to be ambitious.

Going after the ultimate aim is what makes it worthwhile and meaningful. Hitting an easy target isn’t satisfying. Working up to hit the hardest of all, that’s where purpose comes from.

How high should we aim?

The ultimate aim of life for Aristotle is happiness.

For him that means a process of character development and spiritual peace.

It’s not wealth. It’s not outcomes. It’s searching for the truth inside yourself and corresponding it to the world around you. It’s working towards your potential, realizing a part of it, then getting back to work to keep realizing even more of it.

One more quote helps us understand how to make sense of the object of goal setting with the subject of living through a process rather than a series of goals.

“What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.”

Happiness isn’t feeling good all the time. It’s not hedonism or naked selfishness.

It’s the ability of you to reach your potential and share that good with the rest of humanity.

So we have to aim at goals, we have to aim high, but we have to set the goals as a process on how to live the good life, not aim at the outcome of a good life.

Basically, our aim must be to live in the best process that brings meaning, purpose, and harmony to our lives.

My 2025 Goals

When setting any goal for a year, this means the first thing to consider is how is any goal you set works towards the overall aim of living through a process.

• What is the ultimate value of your life?

• What is the deepest principle you hope to live by?

• What type of person do you wish to be?

• What character do you want to display in life’s most trying times?

An overall life orientation is most important when setting any individual goal.

If the individual goal doesn’t build and support the larger orientation, achieving it might actually go against who you wish to become.

I value health, family, faith, and truth. Any athletic goal I set must align with these.

My big goal this year, run 100 miles two different ways.

Importantly, I need my family at both of these events.

I chose a 100 mile race close to our new home for that exact reason. And we are going to a family friendly camping environment for the other 100 mile race to make sure my wife has support and the kids have some freedom of their own on race day.

My family has never seen my compete and I believe having them at my two big solo races will produce faith in them in my work and training while also providing faith inside myself that my aim and course are true to my heart.

I could hit 100 miles in other races, but it would come at their expense and therefore take me away from my ultimate aim, to use the training to become the best husband and father I can become.

So my goal of running 100 miles 2 ways must be subordinate to my larger life goals or else they become meaningless.

Now you set a goal

Before setting ANY goal stop and reflect on how the individual goal supports the overall life aim.

Here’s a great example: Getting back into shape in 2025

Your overall goal is to create a healthy lifestyle.

You set your fitness goal arbitrarily, say signing up for a 1/2 marathon even though you don’t like running.

You start working out but come up against massive resistance. Instead of being motivated to push towards the goal, you begin giving into excuses about why you can’t fit the work in. You don’t see any objective results piling up as victories, and the subjective sense is you’re failing again.

Here’s the problem, you selected an outcome as the goal instead of a process that will allow you to achieve it.

Let’s try again

Your overall goal is to create a healthy lifestyle.

Your fitness goal should be, exercise 3 times a week for the first 3-6 months of the year. Set a process goal that will become a habit, don’t force the habit from the start. This gives you space to explore, adapt, modify, and see what works best for you. It also gives you a chance to set an ambitious goal once you have mastered the first level, showing up for yourself.

Remember, your goal is to live a healthy lifestyle, not hit some objective metric other people say defines ‘fitness’ or ‘health.’

I’d love to know how you go about setting your fitness goals or what you took from how I go about setting mine. Share in the comments and let’s all aim at the right path together.

Happy training friends.