How to Actually Achieve Your 2026 Goals

We’re now 95% of the way through 2025.

Today, we’re going to get a head-start on our 2026 goals. And I’ll share 9 techniques that I’ve learned throughout my career and life that have helped me set better goals, and accomplish those goals.

Specifically, we will cover:

Feel free to skip to the ones you find most interesting, especially if you’re familiar with some of these already. Use the techniques that resonate with you, and leave the rest.

Or, watch along on YouTube as I break each technique down, along with examples and additional resources:

It’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in.

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This is one of the first goal-setting techniques I learned back in business school.

Most people set goals incorrectly.

Here are some examples of poorly designed goals:

These are all noble aspirations. But they aren’t very useful as goals. How do you know when you’ve completed these goals? What will you do to achieve them?

This is where SMART comes into play.

SMART stands for:

As an example, let’s use the poorly define goal of “Make more money”, and make it SMART, one step at a time:

Try reframing some of your goals using this framework now.

As you’re doing this, you’ll notice that New Year’s Resolutions already have a baked in “Time-bound” element. Unfortunately, having the entire year to complete a goal often causes procrastination.

That brings us to Tip #2.

Back in school, did you leave homework assignments to the last minute?

Graduate students experience an even more extreme version of this. They have the entire year to write their thesis, and they often leave it to the final few weeks.

This is Parkinson’s Law in action.

So how do you use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage?

Set artificial deadlines.

This creates urgency and pressures you to do the same amount of work in a shorter amount of time.

Obviously, be mindful. Use your judgment so you don’t overdo it and burn out.

But if you don’t set deadlines, you’ll be left with the default New Year’s Resolution of “one year from now”, which is why so many people fail to achieve their New Year’s Resolutions.

A practical way to apply this is to break your New Year’s Resolutions into smaller chunks:

Which brings us to Tip #3:

You don’t eat a whole loaf of salami, you eat it one slice at a time.

New Year’s Resolutions are usually ambitious, since you’re setting them for the entire year.

This can make your goals feel unapproachable, or daunting.

Instead of focusing so much on the goal for the entire year, break your goal up into smaller pieces.

If your year-long goal is to run a marathon, then start by running 1km. Heck, start by running for 5 minutes on a treadmill.

This is very similar to the approach shared in Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

He recommends scaling this all the way down to the “atomic” level.

Place your running shoes in a visible place so that when you wake up in the morning, it serves as a cue to go for a run.

It can be really fun to create to-do lists.

This can be a good thing and a bad thing.

Creating, tweaking, and improving your to-do list can become a form of procrastination in and of itself.

The 2-Minute Rule states that if something can be completed in 2 minutes or less, don’t put it on your to-do list. Just go do it.

Here are some common examples:

No, not the one for dropping food on the ground!

The 5 Second Rule was popularized by Mel Robbins as a way to short circuit your brain’s psychology of resistance.

When you think of something you need to do, countdown from 5… then go do it.

This works by accomplishing a few things:

We’re more likely to do things we find fun.

Even if your goals are difficult or boring, you can trick your psychology into enjoying them.

Gamification is the application of game-like elements to drive behavior. Some popular examples today include:

So how do you apply Gamification to achieve your goals?

This can be as simple as rewarding yourself for ticking off a to-do list item.

You can take is a step further and track your progress in a visual and aesthetically pleasing way. This will engage your brain in ways that a simple list is unable to.

Or, use the Wealth Potion Quest Log.

One of the reasons I named this newsletter Wealth Potion is because of the concept of Gamification. I noticed how many young people (myself included) who are skilled in video games, often have very successful lives. And it is because we treat life like a giant video game.

So I’ve created what I call the “Quest Log”, which imitates the kind of to-do list you would have in an MMORPG or single-player role-playing game.

Check it out here, and let me know what you think. I’d love your feedback so I can iterate on it and improve it over time.

The Pareto Principle is an observation that roughly 80% of the outcome comes from 20% of the inputs.

Some examples include:

It’s this last point that is crucial for goal setting and achievement.

Not only can this help you prioritize your list of goals more effectively, but it can also help you within each goal.

Once you’ve found those things, then you need to tackle them. Which brings us to Tip #7.

There are many versions of this technique, but I found it most effectively communicated by Matt Mochary.

Matt is a CEO Coach who has worked with Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong, Naval Ravikant, and more.

One of his recommendations for CEOs is to time-block 2 hours (ideally in the morning) to work on your Top Goal, no distractions.

If this technique is used by some of the biggest CEOs in the world, it can be used by you.

PS. Matt’s entire curriculum is open source and can be found online here.

For some people, the Mochary’s 2 hour lock-in works well.

Some people prefer to take breaks here and there. The type of work you’re doing might call for different approaches as well.

The Pomodoro Method is one I used in university to study for my exams.

You work for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break.

There are handy tools online that you can use too:

You could also use the Pomodoro Method to build up your attention muscles until you can work for 2 hours uninterrupted.

Phew! I know that was a lot. This is one of my longest newsletter articles to date, and one of my longest YouTube videos… but I hope it was jam-packed with value nonetheless.

Let me know what you think, which of these techniques you’ll be using in 2026, and let’s get after it!

To your prosperity,
Brandon @ Wealth Potion