Today is the first day of 2025 and everywhere you look someone is proclaiming “new year, new me!” or explaining how the turning of a calendar page will give them the routine and discipline which has been absent their entire life.

If there’s just one gift I want everyone to embrace today it’s the understanding that every day is a new year.

Each day you and I wake up is a new chance to create the life we want to live.

And resolutions? They don’t need to be perfect to be powerful. Most people who set goals for themselves will give up by the second Friday in January, despite 97% of the year still being ahead.

Let’s Talk About Goals

I am a Type-A recovering perfectionist with a bullet journal, of course I set goals. Some of them go fantastically and others are total flops. This year I continued my habit of meditating twice a day, it takes very little cognitive effort because after 6 years it’s a fairly engrained routine.

I also set the goal to do yoga 100 times and did maybe… 10 sessions? My cycling goal fell somewhere in the middle where I royally miscalculated the total (writing journal says one thing, digital tracking another, only off by 300 miles!) and all I know is that I didn’t reach my total miles goal.

When I realized I would fall short of some of these goals in early December, I didn’t give up, I did what I could.

There were other goals which went awesome – I set my usual goal of 52 books to read, something I’ve done successfully 5 out of the last 7 years since I started tracking. When I reached 52 books I raised my goal to 75, then to 80 and read my 80th book on New Year’s Eve.

But the point of goals is not looking back on December 31st, it’s making progress, no matter how small, continually throughout the year. Every page read, every mile ran and every dollar saved counts.

So every day your choice is to give up and wait until the next year begins or dig back in and do something towards your goals.

On Quitting If you truly decide that the goal you set in January is no longer aligned with what you want, by all means: quit. But that’s why honest and thoughtful goal setting is so important.

Word of the Year

I’ve always struggled with this, since it became a “thing” in the 2010s. Once, I went through a bunch of prompts and came out with a list of… 24 words. Great, I’ll just have 2 per month and that’s useless and insane.

This year, I began thinking about a word of the year late in December and after jotting down a few ideas, one kept coming back for me.

Deliberate.

A little googling tells me that deliberate can be slower than intentional but they’re very close synonyms. And I like that I can be deliberate throughout all areas of my life, no matter what the year throws at me.

I can deliberately set challenges for myself and work towards reaching them.

I can be deliberate at work and with colleagues.

I can deliberately reach out to friends I want to spend more time with and deepen relationships.

So in 2025, I hope you can intentionally set goals that align with what you want for your life and take steps every day in a deliberate manner to reach them. Not to do so perfectly or never miss a milestone, but because you want to become more of yourself.