Setting 2026 Goals

I spent a good amount of time in 2026 setting my goals. I also asked many of my friends and family whether they were setting any goals for themselves, and the answers were almost identical:

“I have some stuff I know I need to improve on, but I didn’t set any goals.”

It’s hard to get started when you haven’t been successful in the past, so I wanted to talk a bit about setting 2026 goals — particularly if these are your first ones.

Set a single new goal

Despite our not having any goals set and achieved in 2025, our temptation is often to define a goal for every important area of life. As Gretchen Rubin says in Better Than Before:

And changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny. Generally, I’ve observed, we seek changes that fall into the “Essential Seven.” People—including me—most want to foster the habits that will allow them to:

1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sugar, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol)
2. Exercise regularly
3. Save, spend, and earn wisely (save regularly, pay down debt, donate to worthy causes, stick to a budget)
4. Rest, relax, and enjoy (stop watching TV in bed, turn off a cell phone, spend time in nature, cultivate silence, get enough sleep, spend less time in the car)
5. Accomplish more, stop procrastinating (practice an instrument, work without interruption, learn a language, maintain a blog)
6. Simplify, clear, clean, and organize (make the bed, file regularly, put keys away in the same place, recycle)
7. Engage more deeply in relationships—with other people, with God, with the world (call friends, volunteer, have more sex, spend more time with family, attend religious services)

Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits--to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life (pp. 8-9). (Function). Kindle Edition.

These are all great areas to set goals around, but they are 7 areas already. No matter how disciplined you are, your chances of achieving something like 7 goals when you had no goals before are virtually nil.

Unlike “shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll hit the stars,” goals require focus to be achieved. Your chances of achieving 1 goal out of 1 are much higher than 1 goal out of 7.

One reason we believe we need to set several goals is that we have many areas that need improvement and want to improve all of them. And that’s true.

But the other reason is that often, deep down, we’re not really committed to achieving our goals.

So let’s talk about commitment and accountability.

Learning commitment and accountability

It’s totally OK to wish some things would happen but to not be committed to having them happen. I wish I was practicing the piano, learning japanese, and a number of other things I currently have no real intention of doing. Maybe sometime in the future.

But it’s not OK to have a goal and not be committed to it. And this most often happens to health goals, particularly diet and exercise.

There’s a huge spectrum of human behavior when it comes to diet and exercise: some people are extremely disciplined at both, and some are not disciplined at all. Enormous variation.

What often happens is that we will sometimes set a goal, say “exercise more” or “eat clean to lose weight” but we’re not really committed to it: internally, we know we’re not really willing to change our behavior — to give up on our current bad habits.

One of the most important traits to learn to become a successful goal achiever is to only set goals we can commit to. And the best way to do that is by committing to smaller goals.

Because we have a gym subscription that lets us go to the gym 5x a week, we set a goal to “go to the gym every day,” when instead we should probably say “go to the gym 3x a week.” The difference between these goals is whether we’re consistently achieving or consistently missing them.

In goal setting, learning to achieve goals is an ability in and of itself, one worth learning before you start committing to bigger goals.

In the book Organize Tomorrow Today, the authors talk about the importance of committing to things you can achieve, and introduce the valuable concept of “nailing it”: doing it for 3 months straight at least 90% of the time — no excuses.

SAYING NO

The biggest obstacle that will block you from improvement is committing to too much and getting overwhelmed.

What does “nailing it” mean? If you’ve truly mastered one positive change, we call it “nailing it.” It’s become a popular shorthand catchphrase with many of our students. For you to have fully integrated the improvement and the changes it requires, it means that for three consecutive months, you’ve been able to complete the change on a daily basis 90 percent of the time or better. Whatever improvement you choose [..] you need to be able to do it nine out of ten days for three months straight—with no excuses.

Selk, Jason; Bartow, Tom; Rudy, Matthew. Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life (p. 35). (Function). Kindle Edition.

If you nail your small goal over 3 months, you can always update it to a bigger goal. You’ll see nailing a small goal consistently over 3 months is much harder (but much more valuable) than having a bigger goal you inconsistently achieve.

But which goal should you start with?

Health.

Exercise or diet

Most people either want to eat better or exercise more. It’s tempting to set a bunch of other goals in other areas of life, but honestly, a better diet or proper exercise is likely to have massive improvements in other areas of your life anyway.

If you’re not exercising at all, I think the best goal to set is to exercise. Start with 3x a week and, if you nail it (you only miss 1 day out of every 2 weeks over 3 months straight), increase it to 4x or 5x.

Exercising, consistently, 3x a week over 3 months straight is a huge improvement over being sedentary. 3x a week is not too little: Many strong and fit people don’t need to exercise more often than 3x a week to stay strong and fit.

Again: you’re learning to achieve your commitments before you commit to more. Small successes are always better than ambitious failures when it comes to personal goal setting.

If you’re already exercising consistently, the other alternative is to have a better diet. Start with not eating processed foods with sugar except on 1 weekend day a week and go from there: increase it to once every 2 weeks, and so on.

In my experience, the biggest challenge to eating healthy is processed food, and the most challenging processed foods are the ones with sugar: sweets, cakes, deserts, etc.

Technically, the right goal to set if you’re worried about your diet is to have a healthy hypocaloric (calorie deficit) diet, but you won’t achieve it while eating processed foods with sugar, and there’s a good likelihood you’ll more easily achieve it without it.

I don’t have a lot of great advice on how to quit sugar aside from saying that it is probably a bit like abstaining from alcohol or quitting smoking: It’s just a decision you must make about your life. Until you decide this is no longer a part of your definition of a good life, you’ll keep relapsing.

When I quit alcohol, I had doubts: How will I explain it at parties? Will people think I’m an alcoholic? What does that do to my identity as a wine-drinking intellectual? (yes, I really thought that — humans are weird).

The only thing I can say is that quitting alcohol was not a big deal to anybody else, and it was a really positive change for me and the ones close to me.

Well, one other thing I’ll say is that sometimes we can look around and realize “but everybody else does it, too” but, unfortunately, the world is in such a state of lack of self-control that “everybody else” are rarely sound models. Problematic behaviors are normalized through prevalence, particularly in health.

If you want to use others as model, you’re way better off picking one or two people you admire and trying to analyze their behavior (in that specific area, like diet or exercise, because people who do well in an area will sometimes be out of whack in others).

Doing the same as everyone else will most likely just lead you to having the same health as everyone else, which means not very good health.

Increasing your number of goals

If you had a number of goals you were successfully achieving in 2025, then it’s totally OK to have them as carryovers.

If you are setting brand new 2026 goals, one suggested approach is focus on one of your goals in Q1, then add one in Q2, one in Q3, and finally one in Q4, to a total of 4 goals. Of course, you should only add a new goal if you’re nailing your old one.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with having many personal goals, but you’re optimizing for setting goals you’re committed to and will achieve, and not for having a laundry list of wishes.

So if you want to learn the piano, but you’re not exercising or eating well, you may want to nail exercise in Q1, diet in Q2, and then tackle the piano (or another health goal such as sleep) in Q3.

In 2027, if you have all 4 goals nailed, you can always start the year adding a 5th goal and carrying over the other 4: exercising, great diet, piano practice, sleep, and … [x]. That’s how you build a good stack of goals and good habits.

In short: don’t be in a rush to have many goals. Be in a rush to nail your first goal, that is, to achieve it consistently over a 3-month period.

In summary

Many people I talked to haven’t created 2026 goals. This is a suggestion on how to get started.

If you don’t have any goals yet, you should probably start with a single goal.

Choose a small goal, one you’re confident you can achieve consistently over a 3-month period — what I call “nailing it.”

If you have zero goals, your first goal should probably be exercising 3x/week or improving your diet by not eating processed foods with sugar aside from 1 weekend a week.

Once you achieve the above goal consistently over a 3-week period, and only then, should you make it more ambitious or add a new goal. Learning to achieve goals is as important as the goal itself.

If you do great at this, you can add a goal per quarter, ending the year with 4 achieved goals, which is great.

The theory is relatively simple, but building this muscle, like building any other muscle, is hard. Simple, but not easy, as I like to say.

So perhaps you started 2026 without clear goals and the above encouraged you to work on your goals now. If it did, then I’m glad, and if there’s any other way I can help, let me know.