How To Actually Achieve Your Goals In 2024

Imagine it’s 2025 and you still haven’t achieved any of your goals from the past year… 

Unfortunately, this is the position most people will find themselves in. 

We don’t want that for you, so we’re gonna cut through the fluff and show you exactly what you need to do to achieve your goals in 2024 and beyond. 

Let’s get started. 

What Most People Do To Achieve Their Goals 

Before we explain our process for goal-setting, let’s look at what most people do. 

Here’s a quick list: 

1. They create S.M.A.R.T goals

The abbreviation S.M.A.R.T stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. An example of a S.M.A.R.T goal would be something along the lines of: 

“I want to lose 25 lbs by the end of the year to improve my health.” 

2. They create a vision board to visualize what accomplishing their goals will look like

This is an example of a vision board: 

Source

They might make this their laptop background to constantly remind themselves of what they’re working towards (for motivation). 

3. They tell their friends and family about their goals

Why do they do this? 

Because they think if more people know about their goals it’ll help them stay accountable. 

Why These Methods Don’t Work

After looking at these different approaches, they honestly don’t seem like bad ideas, right? 

But they almost never work. 

Here’s why: 

1. S.M.A.R.T goals aren’t actually smart

The reason is because they rely on the goal being attainable within a certain amount of time. 

This has two parts to it. 

Attainability

First, how do you determine whether a goal is attainable? How do you know whether a goal is actually realistic? 

Well, Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.”

There’s no goal that is or isn’t objectively attainable. It all comes down to how much you believe in yourself. 

And if that’s something you need to work on, then you’ll probably underestimate what you can accomplish, and won’t be as motivated to achieve it. 

All of this is just to say that anything is possible, given enough time. 

Time

Which brings us to the second part of the problem: S.M.A.R.T goals limit you to focusing on things that you can accomplish within a certain amount of time. 

But let’s face it - you’re probably not very good at estimating how long things will take. 

For example, if we asked you to schedule every minute of your entire day tomorrow, how likely do you think it is that everything will go exactly according to your plan?

Probably not very likely - and that’s okay! No one can predict with 100% accuracy how tomorrow is going to unfold. 

So doesn’t it seem silly that people try to predict how the next 365 days are going to unfold? 

That’s why S.M.A.R.T goals don’t work. 

They require you to know how long it’ll take you to achieve something, which none of us can do very well to begin with. 

What’s worse is that the only way we can get better at predicting this is by doing the thing multiple times. 

But if you’re setting a goal, in most cases you’ve never achieved it before, so you can’t possibly know how long it’s going to take you to accomplish it. 

2. They all focus on outcomes over actions

The problem is that most outcome-related goals aren’t entirely in your control.

For example, let’s say one of your goals is: 

“I want to make 10,000 new connections on LinkedIn” 

But that outcome of 10,000 new connections isn’t entirely up to you… 

You could do everything right and still not achieve your goal because of a factor that’s outside of your control. 

You can’t control how the algorithm works, how people will respond to your content, and a number of other things.  

So it doesn’t make sense to set outcome-based goals that you don’t have 100% control over. 

3. Talking about doing something takes away from actually doing it

Remember how we said that one of the methods most people use to achieve their goals is telling their family and friends for accountability? 

The problem with that is: the more you talk about doing something, the less of your energy you’ll spend on actually doing the thing you’re talking about. 

This is a stoic lesson that we learned from Ryan Holiday. 

And before we explain why this works, we need to first explain what dopamine is: 

“It’s a neurotransmitter that regulates your internal reward system. It gives you feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation” 

In summary, you know how you feel good after decluttering something like your desk? That’s the effect of dopamine. 

Now back to the point. 

The reason why talking about doing something takes away from actually doing it is because both of these activities release dopamine. 

Working towards your goals produces dopamine and so does talking about your goals. 

Obviously, it’s much easier to just talk about your goals than it is to work towards them. 

And with the way our brains are wired, we’ll always choose the easiest way to get dopamine, which in this case is talking about your goals. 

This is why working towards your goals after talking about them becomes more difficult, so we recommend that you keep your goals to yourself. 

If you’re looking to someone else for accountability, although that can work if your accountability-partner is a very disciplined person, you really should be working towards developing that discipline for yourself. 

This is the best long-term strategy because having discipline gives you more control of your life. 

This is why you might’ve heard of the quote, “Discipline gives you freedom.” 

What You Should Do Instead

Alright, now that we’ve covered why none of those methods work particularly well long-term, here’s what we recommend you do step-by-step: 

1. Define your overall vision

Ryan Serhant once said something along the lines of, “We remember the years.” 

Think about the past 10 years: what do you remember off the top of your head? 

You probably remember a few highlights from each year at most. That’s it! 

It’s frightening that we can’t remember what we did with so much of our time in the past.  

However, this also helps us realize that we need to think bigger. We need to see the bigger picture of our lives. 

What do you want your life to look like in 10 years? 20 years? How about 50 years? 

It’s important to think far beyond just a single year, so that the outcome of each year lines up with the future you actually want. 

And for those of you who think you’re not gonna live that long, well, science and technology only continue to improve every single day. 

Our mission is to help you live a healthier, happier life, for as long as possible. So we’ll give you all of the tools we have to make sure that you can do just that. 

Don’t ever let yourself fall into the trap of waiting to die; you’ve got so much life left, no matter what your age is. 

It’s up to you to make the most of it! 

2. Identify short-term benchmarks

This is what most people refer to as their annual goals. 

However, we want you to forget about the time-constraint, and just define the next benchmark you’d like to reach in a given area of your life. 

For example, guys, in terms of your physical health, your next benchmark could be: 

“I want a 6-pack”. 

Ladies, in terms of your mental health, your next benchmark could be: 

“I want to be confident in my own skin.” 

It doesn’t matter how “unrealistic” the benchmark seems right now. Just make sure that whatever you choose aligns with your overall vision. 

3. Choose up to 5 of these benchmarks to focus on for now 

Trust us, based on our years of experience, when you try pursuing more than 5 goals at a time your chances of achieving any of them drop by a lot. 

Almost everyone underestimates the effort it takes to achieve anything because you just don’t know what it takes until you actually do it. 

The more benchmarks you go after at once, the more diluted your attention is going to be between each of those things. 

Similarly, the fewer benchmarks you pursue, the more time, effort and attention you can dedicate to achieving each benchmark. 

So if you want to make faster progress towards each benchmark, choose fewer benchmarks to go after at a given time. 

If it were up to us, we’d prioritize our health, relationship, and career/financial benchmarks before any others. 

4. Ask yourself: “What would prevent me from achieving these benchmarks?”

Ask yourself this question for each of the benchmarks you’ve chosen to pursue and literally list out every possible answer. 

For example, if your benchmark is: “I want to put on 10 lbs of muscle.”

What would prevent you from putting on 10 lbs of muscle? 

The list would look something like: 

• Not eating enough protein 

• Not eating enough calories 

• Not resistance-training 

• Not getting enough sleep 

• Getting too stressed out

• Not being consistent 

• And so on… 

5. Reframe your answers from step 4 to determine action-steps to achieve your benchmarks

Continuing the 10 lbs of muscle example, here’s what reframing each of those answers would look like: 

• Eating enough protein

• Eating enough calories

• Resistance-training 

• Getting enough sleep

• Managing stress in a healthy way 

• Being consistent 

• And so on… 

6. Figure out how to do each of your reframed answers from step 5

Alex Hormozi once said, “The more skilled you are, the more general the command can be for you to succeed.” 

For example, what does eating enough protein actually mean? 

If you’ve never worked out before, you probably have no clue. 

But someone who’s been going to the gym for years knows that “eating enough protein” means getting about 0.8g per pound of bodyweight, per day. Ideally, the protein is also consumed in intervals throughout the day instead of all at once. 

So, if you already know how to do all of the things from the previous step, for each of your benchmarks, then great, you can skip this step. 

Otherwise, you need to figure out exactly how to do each of the things you came up with in the previous step. 

These are the actions that you’re going to have to take consistently in order to eventually reach your benchmarks. 

7. Create your ideal schedule to perform all of these actions consistently

Now, it’s time to create a plan of attack. 

For most goals, you can break down the actions you need to take into things you can do on a daily or weekly basis. 

So go to something like Google Calendar or take out a piece of paper and create your ideal schedule. 

Take into account the time it takes for you to sleep, eat, work, spend time with your family, commute, drop the kids off at school, whatever your commitments are. 

Then with the time you have remaining, block out portions of your ideal week to perform the actions (from step 6) that you need to take consistently to hit each of your benchmarks. 

Lastly, include some time at the end of every week or every month to evaluate your schedule and see what you can do to improve it. 

Put this calendar somewhere you can always see it (eg. the background of your laptop). 

8. Commit to this schedule!

This is where the actual goal-setting comes into play.

Your goal is to commit to performing the actions that you know will eventually lead to the benchmarks/outcomes you want, in the context of your overall vision…  

By doing this, you’re only focusing on the things you have complete control over (your actions). 

This way, when life happens and things don’t go according to plan, your self-esteem will not be affected. 

And on that point, you probably won’t be able to stick to this ideal schedule 100% of the time - that’s okay, but do your absolute best! 

Committing to the actions over a long enough period of time will lead to the outcomes you want. 

9. Once you reach a benchmark, repeat the process

Yup, this includes step 1. 

You can re-evaluate your overall vision if you want to. 

Things change - that’s okay. All that matters is that you’re living your life intentionally. 

And who knows - you might repeat this process next month if you achieve a benchmark that soon. 

Remember, this strategy can be used at any point in your life, not just at the beginning of a new year. 

That’s A Wrap!

We hope you found this post valuable! 

If you did, then consider sharing this post with someone you think it could help. The bigger our community, the more we can all help each other :) 

Thanks again! 

Your Internet Siblings: The Healthy Kangaroo Team