Week 431 (brendan@brendanbarca.com)

Here's your weekly dose of Fuel Your Mind Friday where I share business building ideas, lifestyle design hacks, and inspirational content to help you thrive in your work and find purpose in your life.

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PSA: My wife and I have another blog called The Daily Buddhist that comes out every Wednesday. Subscribe here OR follow us on IG!

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GET UNREALISTIC IN 2025: NEW YEAR, NEW YOU

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Somewhere in my mid-twenties, I started taking the idea of New Year's resolutions seriously. I'd pick a few areas of my life that I wanted to improve and set SMART goals to work on them.

Some of my New Year's resolutions during that time were...

• Run a half marathon
• Get a promotion at work
• Go on a solo trip to a new country

While all of these goals were fun short-term initiatives to work on, they lacked any long-term direction. When I set these goals each year, I often forgot to ask myself WHY I wanted to achieve them. I neglected to try to understand how they fit into the bigger vision for my life.

For example, why did I want to get a promotion at work?

The short-term answer was simple = to make more money.

But I didn't stop to think about where that promotion might lead me over the long-term. Was I even on the right career path? Did I want to spend the rest of my life doing this work?

In retrospect, these questions would've been useful and might've prevented me from chasing things that didn't align with my life vision.

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So, how do we start to align our short-term New Year's resolutions with our long-term life vision?

We must start by setting life goals for ourselves. By establishing goals for what we want to do over the course of our life first, we can then determine which short-term goals make sense for 2025.

Don't know what you want to do with your life? No problem. This is the fun part.

Here's where you can get unrealistic. Here's where you can start to dream again.

American author and motivational speaker, Jack Canfield, provides us with a very simple exercise in his book, The Success Principles.
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Here's the Exercise...

Take out a sheet of paper and number each line from #1 to #30. Then at the top of your paper, write "30 Things I Want to Do in My Life." Then begin your brainstorm. Don't stop until you've filled all 30 spots. Go for volume and don't dare be "realistic." This is your finite life we're talking about. Dream big.

I completed the above exercise a few years ago and it's helped guide my New Year's resolutions and other short-term goals ever since. Here are some examples from my brainstorm and what's happened since...

• Life Goal #3: Become a motivational speaker; Progress: Presented 750+ times since 2019
• Life Goal #8: Buy a home in Brooklyn; Progress: Currently living in Brooklyn (still renting... what's the rush? ;) )
• Life Goal #14: Work remotely from anywhere in the world; Progress: Been remote for 6 years (lived in Mexico City & Costa Rica)
• Life Goal #21: Help my wife Pema start her own business; Progress: We've now had a business together for 5+ years

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This year, instead of setting short-sighted New Year's resolutions, take a step back and look at the big picture.

You have XX amount of years left in your life. How do you want to spend them? What excites you?

This exercise should be fun.

Start there and then break it down into the short-term SMART goals for 2025.

!Feliz año nuevo!

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Thanks for subscribing,

- Brendan

​Let's connect on LinkedIn!

​brendanbarca.com​

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PSA: My wife and I have another blog called The Daily Buddhist that comes out every Wednesday. 🙏 Subscribe here 🙏