How To Actually Achieve Your Goals in 2025 (Evidence-Based)

in this video we're going to talk about five pretty easy evidence-based things you can do to massively increase the chances that you're actually going to achieve your goals now obviously when it comes to actually setting and achieving goals generally the thing that separates people who do achieve their goals from the people who don't achieve their goals is the action that they're actually putting into them but if you look at the signs there are actually these five relatively straightforward things you can do to stack the deck in your favor call them hacks call them habits they

don't take very long but they will massively boost your odds of actually achieving the goals and so if you are already doing all five of these things fantastic you winning and if you're not doing some or any of these five things then you've got some very easy wins that you can apply pretty much as soon as you finish watching this video and by the way if you're new here hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author and since 2017 I've been making videos on this channel which are all about the books

the ideas the strategies and tools that can help us live more intentionally be more productive and generally build a life that we truly love I also spent ages researching and writing this book Feelgood productivity which is a New York Times and Sunday Times best cell and this Dives deep into how we can get stuff done without burning out or sacrificing the things that matter most and it's available in paperback hardback Kindle audible basically everywhere books are sold and has also been translated into 35 languages and it's got a couple thousand five star reviews on Amazon

and Goodreads so if that sounds interesting it'll be linked down below if you want to check it out all right so let's start with Point number one now here I want to play you this clip from a guy called Jim ran now Jim ran was a multi-millionaire success Coach Guy based in the US but at age 25 he was completely broke but he managed to get mentored by this business tycoon guy called Mr cha and here he is talking about an interesting encounter with Mr CH that completely changed his life not long after I met

Mr scha we're having breakfast one morning Mr cha said Mr own now that we've gotten acquainted we know each other fairly well he said maybe one of the best ways I can help you he said let me see your current list of goals let's go over them and talk about them and I said what I don't have a list he said well Mr ran if you don't have a list of your goals he said I can guess your bank balance within a few hundred which he did and that got my attention I said you mean

my bank balance would change if I had a list of goals he said drastically so that day I became a student of setting goals and I've used it to dynamically affect my life I've taught it to some of my business colleagues we use it to do business around the world setting goals H so this is interesting write down your list of goals I'm curious do you have a list of goals written down somewhere could you bring them up if someone asked you to see them but you might be thinking this seems a bit too good

to be true this is just some like personal development Guru it's like it surely can't be that basic as just writing down your list of goals do we have any actual science or research to back this up and to that I would like to draw your attention to this study from the Dominican University and these guys were basically testing does writing down your goals compared to not writing them down change your chances of achieving set goals so on the y- axis we've got average goal achievement and then we've got two groups one group did not

write down their goals and the other group wrote down their goals this was the average goal achievement for the group that set goals but did not write them down and this was the average goal achievement for the group that set goals and did write them down the researchers found that if you write down your goals you're around 42% more likely to actually achieve them now I don't know about you but if I could improve by 42% the probability of me actually achieving the goals I've set for myself simply by writing them down I would probably

do that because it doesn't take that long to write down your goals and that is why our evidence-based strategy number one for achieving your goals is to Simply write them down now it doesn't really matter what format you write them down in I personally have a Google doc that I I've named goalkeeper and I've been doing this for the last couple of years and I personally like setting quarterly goals rather than annual goals I refer to my quarterly goals as my quarterly quests and each quarter so every 3 months I like to set around three

or four of them I found that if I set any more than four I don't end up making progress on any of them and so three or four seems to be like a reasonable number oh by the way quick thing if you are watching this before the 4th of January 2025 then you might like to check out the completely free 2-day productivity Workshop that I'm hosting on the 4th and 5th of January 2025 it is called productivity Spark and it's essentially a two-day series of workshops that are hosted by me and also my wife and

also a couple of guests that I aim to help you reflect on 2024 figure out where your work and life are heading and set active goals and quarterly Quests for 2025 it is completely free you can check it out with a link down below and I hope to see you there potentially all righty so now we come to insanely simple strategy for actually achieving your goals number two now here it is worth us understanding a little bit of the brain called the reticular activating system now the RAS is basically a bundle of nerves at the

base of your brain stem that acts as a filter and it determines what information your brain pays attention to obviously in day-to-day life there are millions upon millions of various sensory inputs that your brain could pay attention to so how does it know which ones to focus on well that's where the particular activating system comes in generally based on your goals and priorities the brain filters out stuff that is irrelevant to those goals and priorities and helps Focus your attention on the stuff that actually matters to you the classic example of this is let's say

you buying a car and you're like man I really want to get a Fiat 500 all of a sudden by the fact that you've set the intention to buy potentially a Fiat 500 you will suddenly start seeing Fiat 500s literally everywhere you look and that is not because all of a sudden when you decided to set the goal of buying a Fiat 500 suddenly everyone else also bought Fiat 500s it's because of your reticular activating system because you have said this as a goal for yourself your brain is more likely to notice all of the

Fiat 500s that are floating around the place and so strategy number two for drastically improving our chances of actually achieving our goals is to actually look at those goals that you've written down every single week if not every single day mistake number one that people make is that they don't set goals in the first place but you're not going to make that mistake because you're watching this video mistake number two is that if they do set goals they don't write them down and mistake number three is that for so many of us we set goals

at the start of the year and then we never look at them ever again and so the idea behind strategy number two is that we can harness the reticular activating system by actually looking at our goals every single day or every single week I personally review mine once a week as part of my weekly reset I've got a little journaling prompt that says what were my quarterly quests and how are they going and that means every single week when I do my weekly resets it just reminds me to check up on my quarterly goals each

week I also set three main priorities for the week and then as part of my daily morning Manifesto is what I call it morning Manifesto journaling practice I ask myself a simple question which is what were our weekly priorities and how are they going I like to refer to it as our rather than my because it sort of feels like I'm harnessing all parts of my brain what were our weekly priorities and how are they going so every single week I'm reviewing my quarterly goals and every single day I'm reviewing my weekly priorities this does

not take very much time at all this is like a 10-second job at most but it's just that little jog that the brain needs to be like oh yeah I did intend to sign up for that squash club or oh yeah I did intend to make progress on that particular work task and sometime it's just so easy to forget those things otherwise because we're so caught up in the day-to-day of what's happening in the calendar what's happening in work and in life but by literally spending 10 seconds every week looking back at your list of

written goals or priorities that alone is such a needle moving Insight that I'm amazed that more people don't do it and you know to be honest this video is advice myself because I also sometimes fall off I know all the studies I've read did a a ton of research from my book talking about all this stuff and still I forget sometimes to do my weekly reset where I look at my goals and sometimes a couple of weeks pass where I haven't looked at my list of goals I'm like damn I've actually been less consistent with

the goals that I set because I simply forgot to look at them oh by the way if one of your dreams or goals is to potentially grow an audience or to generate consistent revenue or turn whatever expertise you have into a full-time gig you should definitely check out the future of newsletters report from HubSpot who are very kindly sponsoring this video and you can download this report completely for free using the link in the video description now having a an email list and a newsletter is one of the most underrated I guess social media platforms

out there in that it's sort of like a social media platform but it's also sort of not it is in the sense that you can directly connect with your audience but it's not in the sense that you actually own the platform of your newsletter rather than building the house on borrowed land as it were and this free report is packed with tips and insights to help you create and improve your own newsletter whether you're a business owner or a content creator I've personally had my own email newsletter since April 2018 so it's been over 6

and 1 half years that I've been sending it every single week and one section I really love from the report is that it talked about a bunch of different ways that you can generate recurring Revenue through subscriptions and a bunch of actionable ideas along that vein this resource is made completely for free by HubSpot who are today's video sponsor so thank you very much for them for making this video possible and do check out the free report in the video description all right let's move on to strategy number three and here we can cite this

meta analysis of I think 138 studies that covered nearly 20,000 participants and the authors of the meta analysis found that one simple strategy that you can use to improve your odds of goal attainment is simply to monitor your progress regularly in my case for example in my weekly reset thing I asked myself what were my quarterly quests and how are they going the and how are they going bit encourages me to actually monitor progress generally I give it red yellow or green or I just say kind of on track or off track just even that

is enough for me to monitor the progress that I'm making towards my goals every single day when I make the time to do my morning Manifesto and I ask myself what were our priorities for the week and how are they going again I'm monitoring progress I defined the most important priority ities at the start of the week and now I'm just checking in with myself to see how am I actually doing and achieving them the other way that I personally like to do this monitoring progress thing it's also fairly simple I use an app things

three for my to-do list and within things three I have the various projects that I'm working on so I've got you can ignore Iram and Angus this is sort of two of my team members that I delegate stuff to so that is a project because delegation and stuff but I basically split up my project into work and life and you can see I've got these four different projects under work company relocation life OS Mastermind and learn AI agents and I've got get food on autopilot cuz I'm sorting out like some sort of food situation for

my life these are a couple of the projects that I'm actively working on and about once a week when I update my projects list I will just put a little Emoji of like yellow or green green is it is on track yellow is that it's sort of a bit off track but there's a plan to get it back on track and if it's red it's like off track without a plan you can also monitor your progress in any Wich way you like back when I was writing my book feel good productivity I monitored progress in

terms of word counts for specific chapters because that's like an easy way to make progress more visible it also just makes it feel better as you're achieving a goal if you're able to monitor the progress sort of like the leveling up bar in a video game as you're killing the monsters and doing the quests you're leveling up your experience meter is filling and there's something very satisfying about that but what the evidence suggests is that people who just take a small amount of time to regularly monitor the progress of their goals are significantly more likely

to actually achieve them and that is why that is point number three monitor your progress again super easy super simple doesn't take very long if you are not monitoring the progress of your goals you are leaving a lot of free kind of goal attainment points on the the table and you just might as well start doing it because why not all right let's move on to fairly simple strategy number four and this comes from a psychologist called Gabrielle tingan and it's a strategy called mental contrasting now mental contrasting is the idea where you basically visualize

something that you want in the future but it's not just about visualizing the outcome we find that people who spend too long visualizing having already achieved their goals actually in some in some studies are less likely to achieve those goals but if you visualize achieving your goals and you also contrast it with the obstacles that you might encounter along the way that is mental contrasting and that really seems to boost people's goal attainment and so this psychologist Gabrielle tingan came up with a fairly simple technique called the whoop method which stands for wish outcome obstacle

and plan now the wish and the outcome is where you are basically setting the goal there are all sorts of different ways for goal setting you can use the GPS system which is my personal favorite you can think in terms of facts feelings and functionality you can think in terms of wish and outcome like what is the thing that you wish for and what is the outcome that would that would happen as a result of you achieving that goal but then the key bit of the method is this obstacle and plan you are visualizing the

obstacles that might stand in your path let's say you know I've set the goal of I don't know writing my next book uh by halfway through next year all right cool what are the obstacles that could get in my path well one obstacle is I might not make time for it another obstacle is I might run out ideas and other obstacle as I might feel demotivated when I sit down to try and right and then the final component of the who method is plan what is my plan for addressing those obstacles so I might say

okay cool I'm going to put in 3 hours of my calendar block every single morning to focus on writing I might do a few brainstorming sessions with my team to avoid the problem of running out of ideas and I might use an app that me and my team have built called voice pal to make writing more fun because then I can write the book while talking rather than while simply typing on a computer and so strategy number four that we have here is visualize obstacles and to make a plan again doesn't take very long to

do each time you set a goal you can just spend literally 3 minutes thinking to yourself okay cool wish outcome wo obstacle plan what are the obstacles that could get in my way and what's my plan for overcoming those obstacles and again according to the research this will drastically improve your odds of actually achieving the goal and then finally we come to fairly easy strategy number five and that is to tie them to an identity now the classic example of this is that there was this study where they looked at um voting so for some

of the people in the study they asked will you vote in this election and for the other half they asked will you be a voter in this election and they found that the people who were asked the question of will you be a voter were way more likely to vote than the people who were simply asked will you vote will you vote is an action will you be a voter is an identity so the key thing here is wherever possible when you've got your goals you want to just sort of spend an extra 20 seconds

to tie them to an identity for example one of my goals is to reduce my visceral abdominal tissue because you know genetics and stuff and I want to live longer and healthier and I've been reading outlive by patri here now setting the goal of improving my bench press or reducing my viseral adapost tissue or all that all that kind of stuff is all well and good but if I were to take the 20 seconds to tie them to an identity of I am a healthy person that will make it more likely that I'll actually achieve

the goals and I'll actually stick with it when the going gets tough because I've resonated with that identity similarly I found when I was working on my YouTube channel when I gave myself permission to lean into the identity of I am a YouTuber that was what allowed me to stay consistent with making YouTube videos in the tough times for ages I did not identify with the identity of being an author or being a writer because I had all sorts of imposter syndrome around it who am I to write a BG any of this sort of

stuff but when I lent into that identity of being an author and I start of this video I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and author leaning into the identity of being an author you know what does an author do an author writes what does a writer do a writer writes that makes it a lot easier in the mornings when I'm figuring out what do I want to do with my day what do I want to do with my week oh yeah I'm a writer I guess I should do some writing and these and this is often

in line with the goals that I have for myself so the question would be for whatever goals that you're setting for yourself how can you tie them to an identity because you know there's a quote that I really like from Tony Robbins which is that the strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent in how we Define ourselves if you label if you define yourself as a procrastinator you actually will stay consistent with that if you define yourself as a YouTuber you're more likely to stay consistent with that if you can get

over the Imposter syndrome and Define yourself as a high performer or as an entrepreneur you are more likely to do the sorts of things that high performers or entrepreneurs or healthy people or whatever the thing might be you're more likely to actually do those things therefore you are more likely to achieve your goals in that domain now if you incorporate all these five things which I hope you do because they're super easy to do and you might as well and they're evidence-based and they work if you incorporate these five things there is still one mistake

that you might run into which is the idea of setting too many goals and here I want to link you to that video which is my summary of Cal newport's new book slow productivity that makes a really strong case for doing less but better and doing it in a way that doesn't Foster burnout so if you haven't yet read slow productivity by Cal Newport you can check out that video over there where I summarize kind of the key learnings from the book and I hope you find that useful thank you so much for watching and

I'll see you later bye-bye