I’m sitting here with 30+ goals written out in front of me, feeling completely overwhelmed.
This is part of a life purpose course I’ve been going through. The final assignment is to set goals for the next year. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m sharing this now because it’s the end of December and the timing feels right.
Last year I set 5 goals. I wrote them in a Notion doc and forgot about them for eleven months. I accomplished maybe 1.5 of them. One goal was to get 10k Twitter followers. I got to 7k. Another was to consult 10 artists. I consulted zero. I wanted to make five figures from my online business. I made zero euros.
The goals weren’t bad. I just treated them like nice-to-haves instead of actual targets.
What most artists do (including me until now)
Most people write 5 to 10 things on a piece of paper, feel good about it, then put it in a drawer and never look at it again.
There’s a reason we joke about this. It’s because we actually do it.
The logic seems sound. You set some vague direction for the year. You work towards it generally. You check in whenever you remember. Goals are just loose guidance, right?
That’s what I thought. Goals felt optional. Something to aspire to but not really commit to.
Why that approach fails
I wrote my 5 goals last year and completely forgot about them after a week. They disappeared from my memory because I never reviewed them.
The goals were also too vague. “Achieve 10k followers” doesn’t tell you what to do tomorrow. It doesn’t explain why you need it. It’s just a number floating in space.
And here’s the real problem. Those goals weren’t actually mine. They were things I heard other successful artists say they valued, so I copied them. I thought a course launch and 10k followers would make me successful. But I never asked if those things would actually improve my life or advance what I’m trying to build.
When your goals are borrowed from someone else’s vision, you won’t have the motivation to finish them.
What I’m trying instead
The new framework I’m learning has seven steps, but I’m only halfway through it. I haven’t proven this works yet. This is me sharing something I just learned and think sounds really good, not something I’ve mastered.
Here’s what’s different. You start by writing at least 30 goals. Not 5. Not 10. At least 30.
This sounds insane, but there’s a reason. You need to empty your mind of all the ideas rolling around in your subconscious. Things you think would be cool to do but never wrote down. It took me 90 minutes of walking around my room to come up with 30 goals.
Then you screen each one through three questions. Does this advance what I’m trying to build long-term? Which of my core values does this serve? Is this specific enough that I know exactly what success looks like?
For example, I had written “Get to 25k followers on Twitter by end of 2026.” When I screened it, I realized followers are mostly vanity now. The algorithm doesn’t show your posts to all your followers anyway. So I added a clarification in brackets to remind myself what it’s actually for. Authority and social proof, not engagement or money.
After screening all 30, you prioritize them. The most important ones go at the top based on what serves your long-term direction best. Then you take only the top 5 to 10 goals. Those are the ones you actively focus on throughout the year.
Here’s the counterintuitive part. By the end of the year, you’ll probably only accomplish a handful of your original goals. Maybe 5 or 6 out of 30. The rest will either fall away because they weren’t that important, or get replaced by better opportunities you couldn’t foresee when you wrote the list.
For your top 5 to 10 goals, you write out the smallest possible first step. Then you visualize yourself doing that first step for five minutes per goal. Not the end result. Just the first action. When you picture yourself doing something before you actually do it, your brain treats it like a memory. It feels more natural when you go to do it for real.
The final piece is daily review. You spend two to five minutes every morning reading through your full goal list. Your subconscious makes most of your decisions before you’re even aware of them. If you review your goals daily, your subconscious starts picking actions throughout the day that move you toward those goals automatically.
I’m going to print my final list and hang it next to my monitor. Last year my goals lived in a Notion doc I never opened. This year they’ll be in front of my face every single day.
Three things to take from this
First, write at least 30 goals to empty your mind and force yourself to get specific about everything you want.
Second, screen every goal against what you’re actually trying to build long-term. If you don’t know what you’re building long-term, figure that out first. Ask yourself which goals would drastically improve your life if you accomplished them, not which goals sound impressive.
Third, review your goals every single day for two to five minutes. This is how you reprogram yourself to actually achieve them instead of forgetting they exist.
I haven’t completed this process yet. I’m still screening and prioritizing my 30 goals. I haven’t visualized anything. I don’t know if this will work better than what I did last year, but it already feels more intentional than writing 5 vague goals and hiding them in a drawer.
Start by writing 30 goals this week. Get everything out of your head and onto a page. Make them specific enough that you’ll know when you’ve accomplished them.
Hope you had a great Christmas, and here’s to a productive 2026!
