New Year, New IDENTITY [#15]
Don't focus on what you'll do, but on who you'll become
Happy New Year, Dear Reader,
I hope you are at least half as excited for 2025 as I am (because BOY am I excited!). It’s going to be a game-changing year, and I firmly intend to take you along with me for the ride!
You have probably been inundated with How To guides to New Years Resolutions and probably just as many articles and posts explaining why resolutions are worthless (or worse, the devil). You know me by now, I’ll stay away from those hyperbolic nonsense and instead share a reflection.
In 2024, I used OKR (Objective Key Results) a planning framework well embedded in several organisations, and applied it to my personal life. It worked relatively well, I made some good progress on most topics and really moved the needle more than I had done in previous years.
I’ve also learned this wasn’t enough. Here’s how I’m building my own 2025 for rapid improvements and growth, hope it inspires you.
1. Shift to quarterly planning
I have goals for 2025, but I am breaking them down into quarters. In other words, I’m bringing best practice from corporate life to my own life, making things more manageable and avoiding an intense Q1 that flatlines afterwards followed by a mad rush at Q4 that we all tend to get into. It’s also forcing me to think more intentionally and more strategically about what I want to achieve and how to make it happen gradually. Gradually = more tangible steps and more realistic to get there.
2. Input over outputs
I have no control about how the world will react to me. I can’t say “I will reach 200 subscribers for Transformative Letter by July 2025”. I have no control over this.
What I can do however, is build what I believe are the right inputs, the right effort, to get me there. I can’t control whether you decide to remain subscribed or leave me behind (please, don’t 😢), but I can control how good I make the newsletter. If I make is so packed with value that it would genuinely hurt your career and life goals NOT to read it, and you’d feel selfish not sharing it, I’m doing my part, and I leave the world to do what pleases with it.
If I consistently work on what I can do, I may not get to all my goals, but I’ll certainly have done everything I could to get there, and will have gotten a lot closer than if I obsessed about outputs which are outside of my own control.
3. Don’t think goals, think identities
This is probably the single biggest game changer for me from the last few months to today. For the past 18 years, weight has been a huge issue for me. I have been overweight for most of my adult life, and I spent the majority of it trying to fight it off, to very little avail (if anything, the trendline went the wrong direction year on year!).
But in the last 3 months, I have had outstanding results, losing almost 10 kilos and gaining only 500gr over the Christmas period (which, it may not sound like it to you, is a HUGE win by my standard).
And the biggest difference from all my previous attempts? Identity.
I didn’t focus on what habits I needed to do, or what sacrifices I needed to make to get to my goal. I simply focused on who I had to become.
I focused on becoming the type of person that gets the results I was after.
That’s literally it.
Instead of thinking that I absolutely had to do x workouts a week, I decided to become the type of person who doesn’t let excuses get in the way of his workouts.
Instead of thinking I needed to control calories every meal, I decided to become the type of person who was intentional about what they ate on their calorie budget, recording what I was planning to eat before I did, to allow me to make more intentional choices (and give myself full permission to go beyond my goal, if that’s what I wanted to do).
By the time Christmas came around, my focus on identity over tasks really paid off. I can now officially say, as of this last Christmas that
”I am the type of person who is so set on his goals, he even worked out on Christmas Eve”
“I am the type of person who finds a way to put in 10,000 steps a day, even if he is in the middle of nowhere or has evening plans. I just make it happen”.
These may not sound like big things, but the fact I haven’t lost a 2 months streak of 10,000 steps a day and haven’t let Christmas interrupt 6 weeks of 4 workouts a week is HUGE. A) because it’s something I never thought possible, and yet, I have achieved and B) because if I can keep up during Christmas, then on does any other time of year hope to stop me and stand between me and my goals?
I have given myself the single biggest evidence that I will succeed that I ever could, and because I have this new identity, I am starting 2025 with more conviction that I will get to a healthy weight than any other belief I hold in this whole world.
THAT is the power of focusing on identity.
James Clear mentions that every action you take is a vote towards a certain identity you could have. Vote daily for the right identity, and you will show yourself who you are becoming.
Focus on who gets the results you want, discover what identities they hold, and act as if you were already like them. You will gradually prove yourself right.
I wish you an outstanding 2025 ahead and I look forward to being a small part of this journey with you. What challenges are you facing? Please don’t hesitate to hit me up and I’ll do my best to incorporate this into future articles if it makes sense!
Here’s to you!