My wife sent me a reel from FB of Matthew Dicks talking about his 2025 goals, and reading it made even me think it was “too much”. The same reaction I have when I look at my huge goal lists of the past. But I admire the dive technique. Let’s pick some of them apart to see if they give me inspiration or can help me progress in my own thinking. There’s a video version, but his blog post has the content in a more easily digestible format (https://matthewdicks.com/resolution-update-september-2025/). I love the fact that someone else blogs about goals in a similar fashion to me — setting them, monitoring them, and holding themself accountable publicly.

If you’re following along at home, my analysis isn’t about his goals or level of progress. It is more about insights into another dataset to see if I see any challenges. He includes both personal / life goals and professional / career goals in the overall list, some with progress and some without. Yet I find it interesting that many of the ones he made progress on seem more like sub-goals or metrics to me, not full goals.

For example, he says his goal is pushups+situps+planks+cycling, along with weight loss, and to eat 3 vegetables he’s never tried. While most people would treat weight loss as perhaps a goal, all of those to me seem more like “functional health and fitness metrics”. Maybe even put that under “don’t die!”. If you took the pushups as one of them, would it be “bad” or lack of progress if instead of doing pushups 4x in a week and situps 4x in a week, you accidentally did pushups 5x and only managed situps 3x? Different parts of the body, sure, but they are complementary activities not competitors, other than for time.

Maybe it’s clearer when it comes to writing. His intention was to write 1 novel, 3 kids books, and 3 non-fiction titles, as well as a new solo show. And 24 episodes of a podcast. These activities are NOT complementary — spending time on one is at the expense of the others. And there is only so much gas in the tank. An author at Bouchercon talked about how they are writing 4 different series currently, and as they schedule time for one, it comes at the expense of readers who want one from the other three series. I have had similar concerns about the different projects that I want to do…even with yesterday’s post about a new Quest of the Quill 2025 (trademark pending, hehehe), I designed it around any type of writing counts, not one specific form. Obviously, this author’s goal was to produce more written content, and I think that might be a better goal, with each of the 32 other products adding up to a single wordcount metric. And yet, with some of them down, maybe there’s a complementary metric for how many combined minutes the videos are + the solo show + courses + speak up/moth/pitches.

I also feel like some of the items that he did are more “to do” items as you only do them once. Like replacing the shed, in comparison with a more general concept like organizing the basement or clearing out the garage, both of which have sub-elements that are likely vague.

When it comes to family, it does seem like there’s some sort of overall engagement goal. Writing to his father. Texting his siblings. Getting together with his siblings. Photos with his kids and wife, even digitizing old stuff or making wedding footage. He shows progress on some, and not others, but some of the others are tradeoffs…similar to the gas analogy above, you only have so much social battery energy too, and it takes more to “increase” than to “maintain”. I found that when I disaggregated things as much, I felt like I was “not progressing” when in fact, doing ANY combo of the items counts as progress towards an overall “engagement” goal. You can’t improve all things at the same time.

There is one goal I find fascinating. He wants to win a Moth GrandSLAM. For most of his goals, particularly writing, he talks about “pitching” rather than “placing” articles, op-eds, etc. Because he can’t control the outcome, he can only provide the input and hope. For others, he’s focused on the “how” or what he can control, like texting or travelling. But this one, he wants to “win”. Having seen the Toronto Blue Jays just lose to the LA Dodgers after going the whole season and post-season, all the way past the 9th inning of game 7, and in the end, all the winners or losers can do is play their best to give themselves the best chance at winning. They can’t control the outcome, however much the sports rhetoric is after the fact, claiming that they “set a goal”, never lost sight of it, and landed it in the end. Yet a puff of air or an extra bounce, and the game goes the other way. So why isn’t the goal written as “get to a GrandSlam?” You might want to win an Oscar, so you take roles that lend themselves to Oscar consideration, and do your best, but after that, it’s beyond your control.

Did I get anything out of reading someone else’s goals?

I’ll check out StoryWorthy and his app, that’s pretty direct. Mostly, though, it was just cool to use a dataset other than my own to try and figure out how I would structure things. Of course, that doesn’t mean he should. Our brains all work differently, and what might work for me, wouldn’t work for him. I simply enjoyed seeing his thoughts and tracking…