How to Reach Your Goals in 2026

A simple framework that actually feels good

I’ve been working on my goals and resolutions for 2026, and it’s made me realize how much my approach to goal-setting has changed over time. Those changes have led to me reaching my goals and sticking with my resolutions much more consistently, so I wanted to share my current process. Most people set goals like this:

• Wake up earlier

• Build muscle

• Save money

• Find a relationship

This style has a number of predictable problems:

• Lack of specificity.

• No plan for how you’re getting there.

• At least one goal - finding a relationship - isn’t fully under your control. You can do a lot “right” and still not get the outcome you want.

• At least three of them – waking earlier, building muscle, saving money – are struggle goals. They’re framed in terms of taking away things we like (sleep, spending money) or doing things we find difficult (working out, eating differently).

• Related to this, there’s no motivation. Why do you want these things?

Human behavior tends to follow two general rules:

1. The Law of Effect: What’s rewarded is repeated, what’s punished is avoided.

2. The Principle of Least Effort: All else equal, we usually choose the option that requires the least time, energy, or cognitive work.

This means that we reach our goals by making the behaviors that move us towards them more rewarding and less effortful. We approach things by adding rewards and reducing friction and move away from things by reducing rewards and increasing friction. Moving through these four steps has consistently helped me reduce the friction associated with my goals, and led to more happiness along the way:

1. Setting SMART goals

2. Focusing on motivation

3. Getting to the target

4. Treating resolutions as experiments

Step 1: SMART goals

There’s a lot of ambiguity in the goals I named earlier. How early is “earlier?” How much money do you need to save? Fuzzy goals are easy to procrastinate, and having something clear to aim for reduces anxiety. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound, and it’s a way to turn fuzzy goals into clear ones. Specific means that the goal is clear and unambiguous, measurable means that you can track progress using an objective indicator (like a number or yes/no), achievable means that the goal is realistic given your constraints, relevant means that the goal is attached to larger things you care about, and time-bound means that the goal has a defined deadline. These are more general guidelines than firm rules, and some research suggests that SMART goals aren’t a good fit for tasks that include more creativity or exploration, but setting goals that check those boxes is a good rule of thumb

Let’s start by making our goals a bit more SMART:

Goal: Wake up at X time consistently for a month.

Goal: Gain or lose X pounds by Y date.

Goal: Save X dollars a month.

Goal: Improve my dating life over the next 3 months by taking specific actions:

• Go to X social events per week.

• Spend X minutes per day on dating apps.

• Work on X aspect of myself.

This is already going to improve your outcomes, but I’ve found that things get better when we flip the whole process on its head.

Step 2: Focusing on motivation

You can apply the concepts here to almost any goal, let’s take a simple one as an example: wake up at 7AM consistently. Why do you want to achieve that goal? What are the bigger desires, wants, or motivations that are underneath it?

Maybe you’re like me and want to capture the most creative part of your day, be able to finish work at a reasonable time, or clock enough hours consistently so you feel less stressed about work tasks. Maybe it’s more that there are certain things you want to build time for, like getting a run in or spending some time with your dog. Maybe you find that certain activities you’re trying to move away from tend to happen after 10PM, and forcing yourself to get up earlier is a good way to add some friction to those habits. Write down whatever it is for you.

Motivation: Capturing the most creative part of my day, being able to finish work at a reasonable time, clocking enough hours so I feel unstressed about work tasks.

I don’t actually care about waking up at 7AM, and if I focus on the 7AM part I’m narrowing in on the aspect that is the highest friction and the lowest reward. I don’t want to wake up at 7AM for its own sake, I want to feel good about my relationship with effort and receive all these other rewards. It just so happens that waking up earlier is a good way to achieve that. In other words, it’s a means to an end, not an end itself.

If waking up early isn’t really the end goal, why have we written it down? Let’s change it:

Goal: Capture peak creativity, finish on time, and feel calm and caught up.

This kind of narrative shift might seem pedantic, but to me this goal feels way more exciting! It’s given us something to move toward rather than just a list of punishments we’re thinking of as goals. Then we need a “means” that gets us there, which we’ve already found.

Target: Wake up at 7AM consistently for a month.

Step 3: Getting to the target

It’s easy to say “I’m going to wake up at 7AM consistently” on January 1st when you’re feeling yourself, and another thing entirely to actually do it on February 4th after you were up until 1AM the night before. We achieve our goals by hitting targets consistently, and we hit those targets consistently by reducing the friction associated with them.

There’s a lot of good content out there on this topic, some of which I’ve talked about in other posts: make the first steps “too small to fail,” remove decisions by standardizing a routine, change the environment so the “right” action is the default, automate cues and reminders, reduce setup time by keeping tools ready and visible, add an immediate reward to the start of the habit. Those general ideas help, but you’re going to get the most mileage out of customizing interventions based on your tendencies and vulnerabilities.

Using myself as an example, I’ve been an avid video gamer since I was about eight years old. It’s very easy for me to fall into a hole at 9PM and suddenly realize four hours have passed. This behavior makes it harder to wake up at 7AM, so I need to put some bumpers around it. Hitting that 7AM target is supported by turning my computer off at 10PM every night. It’s also supported by putting my phone far away from me in the bedroom, so when the alarm is blasting away, I need to actually get out of bed to turn it off. This also adds a lot of friction to my “scrolling on my phone in bed” behavior. So, we can write down those behaviors as a list of “supported by’s.”

Supported By: electronics off at 10PM.

Supported By: phone across room.

These behaviors create little systems that make it more likely that we will keep hitting the target even when we don’t have much willpower.

Step 4: Resolutions as experiments

Most people approach their New Year’s Resolutions with this very all-or-nothing framework: we wake up on January 1, pick a few changes we’re supposed to stay committed to for the entire year, and if we miss a few days it’s easy to slide toward “oh why bother try again next year.” A much more useful frame is to treat our goals as ongoing experiments rather than as a kind of commentary on whether we’re a good person. This means:

1. Shortening the time horizon

2. Learning from misses

3. Iterating

A year is just too much time. I’ve gotten much more mileage out of running 30-day tests that help me learn what gets me to hit targets consistently and whether hitting that target gets me closer to my goals. It’s possible that waking up at 7AM isn’t actually a good target, because I don’t particularly care about it for its own sake and it turns out that I’m not any more productive when I wake up early. Why would you stick with that target if it’s not getting you closer to your goal?

Changing the frame and approaching resolutions in this way helps us learn from our “failures.” If you don’t wake up at 7AM it’s not an indictment of your character, it means the supports weren’t strong enough. If you wake up at 7AM but still feel frustrated with your work life, maybe you need to add a different target. The goal is to build a system that works for you over time, and the only way to do this is through regular self-assessment.

Checkpoint: Check in on your target, supports, and progress toward goal after 30 days.

This check-in could include asking yourself questions like:

• How often did I hit the target?

• On days I hit it, did I get the rewards I care about?

• What “supported by” behaviors helped the most?

• When I missed a target, what happened?

In order to answer those questions, we need to adopt a behavior that supports virtually every goal: tracking. We need data, and the only way we’re going to get it is by keeping some kind of record. Take that information and turn it into a summary of what happened in the previous month and what you might change based on what you learned. For example, ““I hit the target 18/30 days. When I turned electronics off at 10PM I hit the target consistently. When I woke up earlier, I ended work earlier and felt calmer. Turning computer off at 10 is inconsistent, so I need to add supports that help me.”

A new way of reaching our resolutions

Now what does our resolution look like?

Goal: Capture peak creativity, finish on time, and feel calm and caught up.
Target: Wake up at 7AM consistently for a month.
Supported By: electronics off at 10PM (supported by an automated website lock at 10PM), phone alarm across the room, tracking performance.
Checkpoint: 30-day review.

Do you think you’re more or less likely to reach your resolutions after going through a process like this? This kind of clear planning helps you design structures that support you, so you still have a good chance of hitting your targets even when you’re not feeling your best. Turning your motivation into a goal gives you something genuinely rewarding to focus on, and it helps you avoid targets that don’t actually help. Treating misses as a normal part of the process, and as essential for information-gathering, makes it easier to stay kind to yourself and get back on track. Iteration helps you keep refining the system until it starts working reliably for you.

If you try this, my top recommendations are:

• Focus on the real end goal you’re trying to reach. What’s the motivation, how can you turn it into a goal, and what would make it really exciting?

• Start small with your targets, and increase difficulty over time. What’s a target that’s too small to fail?

• Treat misses as information. You didn’t miss because you’re a bad person, you missed because the system broke down. How do we use this information to strengthen the system?

• Think in terms of 7-to-30-day experiments. Run the test, review, and make adjustments.

• Track it to change it!

Do this for a year and you’ll be shocked by how far you go.