It’s that time of year again.
Everyone’s posting their 2026 goals, buying new planners, and declaring this will be their year.
I’m doing something different. I’m looking back at 2025 with a 0% professional goal success rate.
Exactly a year ago, I created annual goals like landing five new projects or hitting a specific income level. The kind of goals that would prove I was making real progress.
Fast forward to last week: not a single one accomplished. No favorite checkmarks. Looking at that list made me feel like a complete failure, questioning everything from my work strategies to whether I should just give up on goal-setting entirely.
Then something unexpected happened.
I shared a blog post on LinkedIn about Toronto’s Sixplex Zoning Bylaws. Within three days, it reached over 70,000 views with 40 comments and 60 likes. My first “viral” moment after a year of posting weekly to my usual 500-1000 views.
Here’s what confused me: I failed 100% of my professional goals. I also had my biggest success of the year. How were both of these true?
Turns out, the problem wasn’t my perseverance. It was how I was grading it.
While everyone else is busy creating their fresh 2026 goals, I’m realizing I need to fix how I measure the old ones first.
The Perseverance You Don’t Recognize
As a type A person with binary tendencies (yes or no, good or bad, check or X), I have dropped many projects because they didn’t meet my goals. No checkmark? No progress. No progress? Wrong goal or wrong person. Time to quit and create new goals.
This made all that “keep going” advice sound wrong. Why keep going when you’re clearly failing? When nothing on your list gets crossed off? Perseverance seemed pointless.
But here’s what I missed: I kept posting my blog weekly for over a year.
No goal about view counts or engagement numbers. No plan for a viral post. I just kept showing up, tweaking things along the way with different post titles, posting times, and image sizes.
Without my typical binary metrics, I was testing and improving.
I was persevering without recognizing it as perseverance because there was no checkbox to mark.
The viral post didn’t happen because I suddenly got good at social media. It happened because I had been practicing for a year without calling it that.
The Control Problem in Goal-Setting
I love creating goals. A brand new calendar with no marks gives me all the optimism and hope. By February or March, that same calendar is covered in red X’s from work proposals that came back as rejections and writing pitches that editors passed on.
All those X’s weren’t really measuring my effort. They were measuring other people’s decisions. Whether a client says yes, whether an editor picks my piece, whether timing works out. I can work toward these goals, but I cannot control the outcome.
When I evaluate my year by outcome metrics (projects landed, income earned, weight lost), I am basically buying a lottery ticket and calling it a goal. Slightly(?) better odds than actual lottery, but still mostly out of my hands.
I have always known I cannot control others, only myself.
Apparently I forgot this when evaluating my goals. I was grading myself on things I couldn’t control, then feeling like a failure when they didn’t work out.
The viral post succeeded because of factors I didn’t control (algorithm timing, who shared it, what else people were seeing that day). But I could control showing up weekly. I could control testing different approaches. I could control the quality of what I posted.
One of those is actually measurable progress. The other is just hoping.
Review Instead of Restart
Every year, I would look at my failed goals and create shiny new ones. Fresh start. New chance. Different goals this time, surely.
This was another measurement problem. I was treating each year as pass/fail instead of comparing year-over-year progress.
Now I keep my old calendars and review the same ongoing goals: exercise routine, weekly writing, weekend family time. I grade myself on whether I am doing these more consistently than last year, not whether I have “achieved” them.
Am I the same person I was five years ago? No. (Well, maybe in the weight loss department.) Can I see progress even with my historically terrible goal success rate? Yes.
Comparing this December to last December shows improvement I would miss if I only looked at checkmarks. More consistent posting. Better engagement over time. Actual skill development that led to that viral moment.
The progress was always there. I just kept erasing the evidence by starting over every January.
Final Thought
My past goal planning wasn’t wrong. The evaluation part was.
Measuring outcomes instead of effort meant grading myself on things I couldn’t control. It was also the most discouraging possible approach, leading to many “what’s the point of this” moments every year.
So while everyone else writes their fresh 2026 goals this week (I have been there), I am sticking with my 2025 ones. Same goals, different report card. Instead of “lose 10 lbs by end of year” (again), I am focusing on daily exercise and not buying chips at the grocery store.
Daily exercise sounds doable heading into 2026. The no chips goal, though? That one might require someone else to do the grocery shopping.
Life Outside of Design Studio 