2025: Goal Review
The Meta-Theme: Self as Garden
I've said this about many years, but I really mean it this time: 2025 was a giant year. Friend break-ups, international business travel, earning my brown belt, failed businesses, and successful online learning. It was a year of "Serious Play," a new set of operating rules, and seeking fun and richness in experiences.
I wrote in my initial 2025 post: "Approaching the year this way encourages me to treat my life as a giant and flourishing garden... Here my spirituality grows; there my body is stronger; that bloom is how I'm learning music; that vine is my relationship with my dog."
I took it seriously this year and dug in with gusto. Here is the harvest.
The Stats:
Total Goals Tracked: 123
Completed Goals: 72
Partial Completions: 17
Abandoned Goals:15
Failed Goals:19
Full list of goals here: 2025 Goals
Secret Goals stats:
Total Goals Tracked: 12
Completed Goals: 8
Partial Completions: 1
Abandoned Goals: 2
Failed Goals: 1
Greening the Mind:
Theo Grutter is a poet that radically changed my way of thinking with his concept "Greening the Mind," exploring our culture's antagonistic relationship with nature. Our minds ought to be wild outgrowths of our creativity, able to reimagine our relationship with all phenomena, including nature, including the cosmos, including our own bodies. Several of my goals in 2025 reinforce this commitment.
My biggest successes:
Feel the least amount of inflammation pain I've felt in years: This success is one of the greatest quality of life improvements I've ever had. About 2 years ago, I went on a incredibly restricted diet to deal with a gut bacterial infection and along the way, discovered some intense food allergens. After eliminating them from my diet, my body has never felt so consistently good. I still have flare ups, but it feels good to be in my body again.
Balance the fine edge of directness with low hostility: When you are raised a people pleaser, you find ways to avoid directness. When you break the people pleaser, you find so much hidden hostility and aggression buried inside you. Add to this that words and language is my magic power, and when I'm not careful, I can cut without intention. This goal (along with practicing nonviolent communication) was an effort in being true to myself and also not being sharp about it. I've changed the way I talk to people about my boundaries, I've changed the way I manage my team and talk to executives, and the softened the way I approach most relationships.
Biggest Failures:
Regular Tarot Reading and offerings to the gods: I didn't engage heavily with these this year for two different reasons. For tarot, my giant reading goal captured the morning tarot study slot. For offerings, as my engagement with formal Buddhism waxed, my attention to named gods waned. There's something missing here that I'd like to recapture in 2026.
Daily Meditation: I had seasons this year where this was very consistent, and I've certainly incorporated moments of open awareness and snaps of meditative states into my daily habits, I'm a bit disappointed that I wasn't consistent with a sitting practice. It has such a profound impact on my daily experience and my treatment of others that I feel like I've done an ethical disservice to my friends, partners, colleagues for not doing this.
System Update 2025:
A new era requires new basic habits. This theme is about remodeling how I do everyday things.
Biggest Successes:
Full retirement savings this year: This has been a goal for several years. It's bougie, but owning two homes has been challenging to have enough income to put aside to hit my full savings goals. We opted not to "take the raise" this year when my salary increased, and I put all of the money directly into retirement.
Tech Stack Mastery: I went from poorly informed to moderately capable on ERP, Salesforce, Architecture, and AI. These are the linchpins of enterprise transformation, moving me closer to my career goals.
Meal Cooking and Sauces: I learned to cook this year. I feel comfortable at this point with making lots of meal variations, juggling multiple dishes cooking at the same time, and balancing the flavors of the meal. There's an endless journey ahead, but that feels more like fun, rather than a chore. There's art and creativity here!
Biggest Failures:
Personal Brand and Side Businesses: I did a remarkably bad job at growing my personal brand and pushing side-projects this year. I missed my very achievable coaching goal, Athena crashed and burned in the wake of DOGE cuts, I spoke at no conferences, was on no podcasts. I wish that I worked a bit harder at this, but instead I focused my attention into pursuing a promotion at my day job and carving out territory at work. I'm poorer for it in the short term and I'm entering 2026 with few irons in the fire.
Body
This theme covers the scope of being inside a body, diet, and health and my many movement practices
Biggest Successes:
Embodiment: This was another strong success this year. I had relatively few inflammation bouts with far riskier eating habits, my body and my joints feel the most healthy they've felt in years. I had no real injuries this year, despite training harder than ever.
BJJ: I had a ton of success in this space this year. I set a total of 11 goals this year, and achieved all of them. There was split between technique improvement (takedowns, body lock passing) and being a better coach (eco-style curriculums, writing and posting class notes). I'm very pleased with this outcome and I love seeing that putting effort into this area has paid dividends.
Worst Failures:
I was atrocious about lifting and mobility work this year. I was the most casual I've been about both in a long time and it shows. My flexibility has decreased, and while I honestly feel stronger as a grappler, I don't look as good, and I'm not as lean. This is fixable and likely just a matter of 80-20 on doing some easy programming regularly.
Serious Play:
This is a broad theme that covers many categories., ranging from creative endeavors, spiritual insights, reading, writing, dancing, and learning. I had *a lot* of goals in this category this year. All up 54 goals in this category, and this category also had the widest spread of successes (27), partials (6), failures(12), abandons(9).
Best successes:
Reading my Height in Books: This year I read over 100 books across a wide spectrum of genres. I averaged at least an hour a day of reading, and often several hours per day for the massive majority of the year. It was wonderful to spend so much time luxuriating in words.
10 sessions of TTRPG's: One of the great pleasures of the year has been playing Dungeons and Dragons with Mary. We've played so many sessions of Arden Vul and there is so much more to play in the next year!
Worst Failures:
I was pretty mediocre at my music goals and writing goals this year. I spent far, far more time in front of a book than in front of the piano.
I'm also disappointed I didn't make more time to write this year. The linear exchange of time is absolutely the biggest blocker for this, but not having a ready discipline or practice to make space for writing was weakness. It literally felt like my brain was full of words, but the writing practice was gunky or pinched.
The Synthesis: The Gap, The Friction Point, and Acid Tests
The Gap: Linear Time
I wildly overestimated my relationship with linear time. Every hour I spent reading was an hour I couldn't spend writing or building a business. I didn't budget time to create; I budgeted time to consume and train. In 2026, I must be mindful of these linear time conflicts.
The Friction Point: Ambiguity
My biggest friction point of 2025 was ambiguity paralysis. When a goal made me go, _"I don't know what to do,"_ I often chose to live in the confusion rather than just trying to _do the damn thing._ Yet, in other areas, I acted despite the unknown. My challenge for the year ahead is to identify the mechanism that allows me to act in the face of ambiguity and apply it everywhere.
Acid Tests:
Acid tests originally were used to distinguish real gold from any number of other minerals. Nitric acid was used to test metals and if it oxidized or decayed, it wasn’t real. These questions are acid tests for the whole process of goal setting.
Which goals actually mattered?
Of all the goals, the ones that will likely have lasting impact on my life are the cooking, nonviolent communication, vow of refuge, dog training, engaging more deeply with Mary, working with AI tools, and low inflammation skills. In terms of less "practical" impact, the style of learning I did with BJJ, the success I had with online courses, and performance experiences. My giant reading goal also edged out my attachment to social media which has dramatically affected my mental health.
What mattered that I didn't do and what am I gonna do about it?
The writing goals, meditation, personal brand and side business opportunities have the biggest potential outcomes and I didn't invest the proper time into completing them. These are priorities for next year.
Is all this just busy noise? Is there something you should have been doing instead?
I’ve stated my long-term objectives and a ton of my goals directly tie to them. I want to live a rich life, full of a wide-range of experiences, and to do that, I need to accomplish a lot of different things across a lot of different fields.
You could easily argue that spending time reading or doing jiu jitsu or training my dog is a waste of time over building a business, or helping solve global crisis, or pursuing a political career (or something?). And from a certain angle, you’d be right.
My challenge to you, you critical question-asker, is what are we here to do? Are we here to be workers? Are the only lives that matter the ones that fulfill some mission? I defy this burden. Every time I’ve let this plant into my garden, it runs like a weed through every plot, strangling meaning, and leaving a nasty nihilism rot in its wake.
Instead, I propose, you discard that poison seed. Come feel the spectrum of ecstacy, the medicine of challenging experiences. Stop worrying so much about whether your fix the world and fix yourself instead. Green your mind. Breathe in the mélange of all phenomena, and breath out your creativity, your problem solving, your intimacy, your kindness, your anger, your sweetness and desires.
I’ll let Theo finish up this defense:
”When I think about progress, I also realize that my dearest moments came to me when I abandoned the lifestyle of just rational progress, of the practical, chasing safety and comfort and being plugged into our own round-the-clock news. My happy hours began when I left our free ways of the land and of the mind, the store-bought meat, the printed science of nature, the supermarketed psychology, the convenience of sipping knowledge nicely processed into alphabet soup. These glorious moments blessed me when I did not buy artificial love fantasies that do not need caring nor produce love sickness, when I passed up fast answers of mass-produced religion for busy minds and I covered my ears to Madame Economy's siren songs.”
