How to Achieve Anything You Want in 2025.
It is the start of a fresh new year and if you are like me, you are probably eager to get things started. You have the goals you want to tackle, obstacles to face and problems to solve.
It is a new year full of promise and potential.
And it could be your best year yet
…if you locked in.
What does it mean to lock in?
It means being tapped in, being connected, being committed. It means choosing a course of action and being completely committed to it.
And right there is our first condition for locking in – knowing what you want, what you are locking in for.
If you have been finding it hard to lock in, to really focus and put all your energy towards something, it could be just because you haven’t found or decided on something you truly and really want.
But if you already have that thing in mind, then you are in the right place. Even more so if you have tried multiple times and failed. You started that diet and exercise regime this time last year, and by February, they were long forgotten. You stated all those plans for your career and business, and by the time you got to December, you found yourself miles away from your intention, mired and busy with the agendas of others.
I know this well…because that has been me many times.
The good news about trying and failing to make things fit is that you are trying, trying to make something work, and that can be frustrating, but if you keep at it long enough, eventually something clicks…and then you lock in.
systems. kaizen. environment. seasons.
systems
The thing about making real and lasting change is that it has to be sustainable. Your tactics have to simple enough to manage over time.
And your biggest levers, the things you need to pay attention to are your systems and environment. Everything, every goal has to break down into its systems
The art of chasing a goal in a way that helps you not burnout is to take a lifestyle approach to it. Instead of just focusing on the goal and trying our best to follow the needed actions with willpower, we do something different.
We ask ourselves what we need to do consistently to reach that goal. Then we incorporate those actions into our regular lives and over time shift into the kind of person that naturally achieves their goals.
If for instance, we wanted to be healthier and fitter, we know what we have to do is eat better, exercise more and rest properly. We would probably need to stop ordering so much takeout and cook more. We would need to make the time to workout and move our bodies. We would need to respect our down time and make sure we get proper sleep.
Depending on who you are and what your life is, your answers to these issues would be different. And they probably are not very easy fixes. You might not even be able to do the thing you need to do yet.
You might need to cook, but maybe you don’t even know how to cook or what to cook. You might need to workout, but now you have to decide, do you go to the gym, or do you work out at home. Each component becomes a mini projects on its own.
But if we can keep with the process, not being so stringent on ourselves and prescribing what exact actions and roads we should take to our goal, then we can be creative and evolve ways of being that work for us.
kaizen
You need to think of these areas of your life as systems. Then you need to design and improve them to align to what they need to be. So sure, go ahead, take massive action.
Try to make the overhauls and effect the changes in your life with willpower, but as they fail, observe the points of failure and make corrections. As you fall back to your usual baseline of activity, look at ways to subtly improve and change small aspects of it.
Maybe instead of cooking every single day, you commit to just one meal a week. Thats tackling the issue from an action and habit point of view.
You could also get inspiration and flood your mind by watching cooking content, see how people make their meals and tackle managing their kitchens. Over time, you will change things. Maybe it starts with the things you buy for groceries, and as you get more comfortable with cooking, you are able to average 2-3 meals in some weeks.
And as you keep doing this, sooner or later you become a decent and regular cook and are on your way to being a more healthy person in a natural and more sustainable way.
That is the idea of this approach – to be natural and sustainable, to tackle issues from a root cause, to actually evolve and grow into this new person. It might take a while, but it is a stronger way to make that change and lock into your goal.
environment
The other massive lever in locking in, is your environment. A lot of how we operate and move as humans is on instinct, subconsciously. And your environment is the biggest influence on your choices and your actions.
The things around us can trigger a response before we even really think about it. Trying to quit sugar is much harder if you always have sweets hanging around. If you don’t make your environment an ally in your transformation, you will never change.
Do you want to give that project more time this year, then make a dedicated space for it in your apartment. Leave the tools lying around. The more you see them, the more you will be reminded of and inspired to take action.
You want to cook more? Make it easier to see and access your groceries and cooking gear. Invest in your kitchen and make it a pleasant place for you to make food.
You want to reduce friction, and reduce the steps you need to take to take the action you need to. You want good cues, triggers that will inspire you to do the right thing.
Remove distractions. Design your space and curate your environment to reflect the person you want to be.
seasons
So far I have discussed taking the easy and relaxed approach towards your goals. Slow changes in your habits and environment to help you evolve. I advocate that because it is easier than what we usually tend to do sometimes – go all out.
More often than not, you will always return to your baseline – your average performance, actions and habits. But now and again you do need to push past that and create a new baseline.
There are times you need to make a strong push. A full frontal assault on your dreams.Sometimes you do need to burn everything down and build it up again. Sometimes you need to put in a lot of effort and embrace difficult new practices and habits.
These seasons are important to push you over your present comfort zone and break you through to new experience and results. These are strong bursts and can’t be maintained for long, but they are important to do because the experience exposes us to new lifestyles and ways of being. With regular exposure, we can acclimatise to them.
After these strong bursts, As we tire and life gets in the way, we return down to a new baseline and focus on maintenance until we get to the next push season. From this new baseline, we can continue to move forward at a leisurely pace, as long as we keep moving and improving
Now what happens when you have been approaching multiple parts of your life with this sort of framework. Let’s say you have been messing around with content for a few years, having on and off seasons. Let’s say you have been refining and improving the business behind the scenes. Let’s say you have been maintaining a decent health baseline. Let’s say now you’ve got enough practice in all these different aspects of life, and now you have everything you need.
It opens up these seasons of time where the potential output of a lock-in season can be massive. Where all these different parts can coalesce to exponential growth and change.
That is the season I sense now, that with all of the small changes, all these improvements to the different systems that run my life, I can do some really interesting things.
For me, locking in means, doing what needs to be done, pushing each system as high performance as it could go and allowing them all work together to set a new baseline and to produce substantial results.
A whole year of locking in…that could be something spectacular.
