How To Set Goals For 2026 That You’ll Actually Follow Through On

BigDeal

Codie Sanchez

Marketing, Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.9 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Most people think goal setting is about writing down what you want. It's not. It's about creating gravitational pull so strong that your entire life reorganizes around what you're building. After 15 years of setting and hitting impossible goals — from building multiple businesses to launching a top podcast to selling a million books — I've cracked the code on why most people fail and the few who win do it differently. In this episode, I break down my exact five-step process for setting goals you'll actually follow through on in 2026. You'll learn the regret minimization framework from Jeff Bezos, why Elon Musk uses first principles and backwards timelines, how Warren Buffett's 5/25 rule forces ruthless focus, and why Sam Walton obsessed over daily numeric targets instead of quarterly objectives. I reveal why exploitation keeps you efficient but exploration creates breakthroughs, how to use goal gravity to pull everything towards your target, and why your year needs a name before it can have a plan. But this isn't theory — it's my actual goal journal from the last 15 years. I show you my relationship goals, work targets, travel plans, and even the silly stuff like feeling more feminine and cutting out bread (spoiler: didn't nail that one). You'll see my "more of/less of" list, why I track daily streaks, and how I turned 2024 into my "full send" year and 2025 into my "year of flow." If you're tired of setting the same goals every January and abandoning them by February, or if you want to finally build a life most people only dream about, this episode will change how you think about goal setting forever. It takes 21 days to create a habit, but 90 days to create a totally different lifestyle. Start your timer. This is day one. Protect what you own. Next makes it fast, simple, and painless. Check it out: https://www.nextinsurance.com/codie ___________ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:12 Goal Gravity: Why Small Goals Kill Your Future 00:02:13 Exploitation vs Exploration: The Fork in the Road 00:03:44 The Regret Minimization Framework from Bezos 00:04:40 Name Your Year: The Power of Framing 00:06:26 First Principles and Backwards Timelines: The Elon Musk Method 00:09:21 The Four Goal Categories: Relationship, Work, Travel, and Fun 00:11:37 The Say No List and Warren Buffett's 5/25 Rule 00:13:17 More Of, Less Of: The Anti-Goal Method 00:14:59 Daily Scoreboard: Sam Walton's Obsessively Measurable Goals 00:16:54 The Five Patterns of World-Class Goal Setters ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	There's one thing you can do if you don't want next year to repeat what happened to you in 2025,
0:04.8	and that is to change the way you plan for goals and execute on them. Today we're going to break down
0:10.0	how to make 2026 your best year yet. How do you set your goals so you actually achieve them this
0:18.6	year? I'm going to give you guys my step-by-step process that I've
0:21.1	been doing for 15 years so you can steal my homework. Because like T.S. Eliot said, only those who will
0:26.6	risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. I always think about this line that
0:31.8	Dave Chappelle said, at any given moment, the one with the bigger dream wins. And then he talked about
0:36.7	this story where he always
0:38.5	tries to control the dream. And he said, I am a very powerful dreamer. But I think the trick to that
0:44.0	is you actually got to know what you'll want. Otherwise, you will be in somebody else's dream.
0:49.3	And so this big goal that you have today, if you don't take the right steps to hit it, you will
0:56.9	never have the life that you want.
0:59.0	You will be living in a series of like maybe's potentially could of should haves and never
1:04.2	actually achieved.
1:05.9	But my goal is that you steal my homework today and you don't live anywhere near that.
1:10.2	There's a couple
1:10.8	concepts I want you to steal today. One I call the goal gravity. So this is the force that
1:15.8	pulls everything in your business and life towards whatever your target is because your goal
1:20.9	actually means nothing if your habits stay the same. And so you can't have, first of all,
1:25.6	small goals like T.S. Eliot said, you need a big goal because that allows your priorities to sharpen.
1:31.6	It allows you even if you miss, and you probably will, you land somewhere you couldn't have reached playing at small.
1:37.2	So I want you to think about your goal as this big, huge planet that's just pulling all of these things to it because the gravitational pull is so
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Codie Sanchez, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Codie Sanchez and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.