Reaching your goals starts with a step most people skip: honestly evaluating what happened last year. Before you spend time crafting ambitious new goals, take a hard look at the ones you already set. Did you hit them? If not, why not? If you do not answer that question, you are setting yourself up to repeat the same mistakes.

Evaluate Before You Plan

Most people are eager to put last year behind them and start fresh. That is a mistake. If you do not understand what caused last year's gaps, you will recreate them. Einstein is often attributed with saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If you want 2026 to be different from 2025, you need to do something different. That starts with understanding what went wrong.

I will be honest: if I critically assess what I wanted to accomplish with my online business compared to what I actually got done, there are significant gaps. That is okay. It happens. One of the reasons we set goals is so we can assess our progress and adjust.

How to Evaluate Your Goals

Take 30 minutes and write down every goal you set for last year. Next to each one, write what actually happened. For the goals you missed, ask yourself:

• Was the goal too vague to act on?
• Did I lose motivation because my “why” was not strong enough?
• Did I fail to break the goal down into actionable steps?
• Did something change in my life that made the goal unrealistic?
• Did I simply not do the work?

Be honest. The point is not to beat yourself up. The point is to identify the specific thing you need to change so the same gap does not appear again.

Then Set Better Goals

Once you understand your gaps, you are in a much stronger position to set goals that you will actually achieve. Make them specific and measurable. Attach deadlines. And most importantly, make sure your approach this year is genuinely different from last year's approach. If you do the same things, you will get the same results.

What's Changed Since This Post

The practice of conducting annual reviews before setting new goals has become mainstream productivity advice. Tools like Notion, journaling apps, and structured reflection frameworks have made the process more accessible. James Clear's Atomic Habits popularized the idea that goals alone are not enough — you need systems and identity shifts to support them. But the foundational step Mark described — stop and honestly evaluate what happened before planning what comes next — remains the essential starting point that most people still skip.