Climb the Mountain—or Just Love the Climb

Why the best New Year’s goals are built around process, not the summit

Every January, we dust off the same ritual. New year, new goals, new promises to a better version of ourselves. We resolve to make more money, get promoted, lose weight, write the book, finally get our act together. And then—predictably—by mid-January or early February, most of those resolutions quietly die.

New Year’s resolutions aren’t the problem. Goals aren’t the problem either. The problem is the way we design them.

We tend to set goals that are entirely dependent on reaching the top of the mountain. Promotion. Net worth milestone. Publishing deal. Finish line. These goals are clean, measurable, and socially impressive. They also share a fatal flaw: they often require long stretches of doing things we actively dislike.

Take the promotion. To get there, you might need to work nights and weekends, sit through meetings that drain you, take on responsibilities you don’t enjoy, and say yes far more than you want to. Or take the goal of publishing a book. Writing may be the thing you love—but the path you believe leads to success involves endless self-promotion, social media posting, brand-building, and algorithm-chasing. You tolerate it, but you don’t enjoy it.

These are anxiety-producing goals. They ask us to sacrifice the present for a future payoff that is uncertain and often far away. And when progress feels slow, or when the mountain starts to look steeper than expected, we quit. Not because we lack discipline, but because the process itself is miserable.

There’s a better way to think about goals, especially at the beginning of a new year.

The alternative isn’t to abandon ambition. Big goals are fine. Audacious goals are fine. What matters is how those goals are constructed. The key question shouldn’t be, Will I reach the summit? It should be, Do I like the climb?

If you love climbing, the mountain is almost beside the point. You might reach the top. You might not. Weather changes. Injuries happen. Life intervenes. But if you love the act of climbing—each step, each hold, each view along the way—then your time has been well spent regardless of the outcome.

New Year’s resolutions should work the same way.

Consider health goals. Saying “I’m going to run a marathon” sounds admirable. But if you only enjoy running for the first ten or twelve miles and hate every step beyond that, you’ve built a goal that relies on prolonged suffering. You might push through. Or you might burn out halfway through training and abandon the whole thing.

Now imagine reframing the intention. Instead of fixating on the marathon, you decide your goal is to be healthy and active, and you choose activities you genuinely enjoy. Maybe that’s basketball three days a week, playing hard for an hour at the local gym. On other days, you hike, walk, or jog. You’re still improving your cardiovascular health. You’re still building strength and endurance. You may even end up marathon-ready. But if you don’t? You’ve still succeeded, because the process itself was rewarding.

This is the kind of goal-setting that lasts.

At the beginning of the year, it’s far more useful to set intentions than ultimatums. Intentions focused on process. Intentions that make room for joy. Intentions that allow for partial success without labeling it failure.

Here are a few principles that help:

First, choose goals built from activities you like doing. Not activities you tolerate. Not activities you endure for a payoff. Things you actually enjoy.

Second, let the goal be big enough that you might reach it—or might not. Both outcomes should be acceptable. The uncertainty is part of what makes it interesting.

Third, make sure the goal contains many small, meaningful milestones. Micro-goals you can reach weekly or monthly. These incremental gains should feel satisfying on their own, not just as steps toward something else.

And finally, choose goals that won’t devastate you if they don’t happen. If missing the target feels like a referendum on your worth or success, the goal is too brittle. The best goals are resilient. They allow you to say, “I didn’t get there and that’s okay.”

This mindset matters just as much with money as it does with health or career.

Financial milestones—$100,000 net worth, Coast FIRE, full financial independence—can be motivating. There’s nothing wrong with naming them. But those numbers are only as good as the life you’re living while chasing them.

If the path to your financial goal involves side hustles you hate, constant exhaustion, or trading all your free time for marginal gains, it’s worth asking what you’re really optimizing for. Getting halfway to a goal while enjoying your days may be far better than reaching it while being miserable.

Sometimes that means adjusting the goal. Sometimes it means accepting slower progress. And sometimes it means recognizing that “good enough” is actually good enough.

The point of a New Year’s resolution isn’t to white-knuckle your way to a finish line. It’s to align your days with how you want to live. Goals should pull you forward, not grind you down.

So set intentions. Dream big if you want. But design your goals around processes you’d gladly repeat even if no one was watching and no prize was guaranteed at the end.

If you reach the summit, great. If you don’t—but you loved the climb—that’s great too.

Happy 2026.

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