Name: How To Actually Achieve Your Goals in 2025 (Evidence-Based)
Uploaded: 2025-01-16T13:34:48.000Z
Duration: 14 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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're already doing all five of these things, fantastic, you are 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, Feel Good Productivity, which is a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller.

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 wanna check it out.

All right, so let's start with point number one.

Now here I wanna play you this clip from a guy called Jim Rohn.

Now Jim Rohn was a multimillionaire 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. Shoaf.

And here he is talking about an interesting encounter with Mr. Shoaf that completely changed his life.

Not long after I met Mr. Shoaf, we're having breakfast one morning.

Mr. Shoaf said, Mr. Rohn, 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.

He said, well, Mr. Rohn, if you don't have a list of your goals, he said, I can guess your bank balance within a few hundred dollars, which he did.

I said, you mean my bank balance would change if I had a list of goals?

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.

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.

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'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 three 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.

Alrighty, 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 brainstem 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 reticular 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're buying a car and you're like, man, I really wanna 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 set 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, it's 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 gonna 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.

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.

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 sometimes 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 and 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 to be honest, this video is advice to myself because I also sometimes fall off.

I know all the studies, I did a shit ton of research for 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 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 six and a half years and 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.

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

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