For the first time, I've decided to publicly show how I move toward my goals, what challenges I face, and what lessons I take away. Meet my virtual public character.
My vision for 2025.
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that every January I set myself at least 52 goals for the next 12 months.
But I usually don’t show my path toward those goals, or the internal and external obstacles along the way — I deal with them quietly, one-on-one, without putting it online.
The first, and main, deliberate change for 2025: I’ve decided to publicly show how I’m moving toward my goals, what challenges and problems I run into, what lessons I take from them, and how I keep moving forward.
I thought it would be interesting to share this by creating a virtual public character. AI generates the photos for it. I’ll tag every post in this series with #ost_virtual_character.
The idea is that I build a public list of goals for the year. I’ll also add the habits and skills I want to develop over the next 12 months.
I’ll put all of this into text and visuals.
I’ll report on progress regularly (every month) and show you what’s going on behind the scenes of my life.
Right now I have 3 main directions in mind for 2025:
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Pick one main idea (a credo) that I’ll pursue over the next 12 months. In 2024, for example, that idea was laying the foundation for our business. We moved into our own studio, built a new team, set up basic processes at the school, and got a bit better at working with content. So last year, for me, was like building a railroad. Laying the track is hard; riding on it is easy. My 2024 credo was: “Laying the foundation.”
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Build a list of more than 52 goals. Last year, I closed out 39 of 67 goals. I consider that a decent result. This year I’ll go into a lot more detail about my plans and why I want to achieve them.
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Pick 12 new habits and skills to work on. Last year I wrote every month about the habit I’d been working on over the previous 4 weeks. But again, that was without much deeper context — why I wanted that habit, and exactly how I was working to build it. In 2025, I want to share not just the list, but all the detail and context behind it.
I think that’ll be much more useful for you, and you’ll be able to see the cause-and-effect relationships, instead of just a report on what worked and what didn’t.
So that’s the vision I’ve settled on for the coming year.
For some reason, I have a feeling that publicly documenting my life from the inside will add extra drive and motivation for me, and bring real value to you as well.
What do you think of this idea overall?