How to partner with your brain to set goals that will make you feel better in 2025.

I gave up on New Year’s resolutions so long ago that I don’t even remember the last one I made. What I do know—beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that I didn’t “achieve” whatever goal I set way back then (which was probably about weight loss), and that it did not make me feel better about myself. And after observing a similar pattern for most of my adult life, I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Now, if this five-star endorsement of my ability to achieve my goals has you feeling a bit iffy about whether or not you should be following my advice, I totally get it.

Wait, you’re still here?

Amazing! Thanks for the vote of confidence.

After all, if you read the title of this article carefully (which might have been hard because it was paired with such a distractingly cheery image) you understand that my goal for this post is not to help you achieve your goals. In fact, after listening to this conversation between Adam Grant and Emmanuel Acho, I can almost get to a place where I see achieving your goals as a type of failure.

But wait, if you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, what’s the point of setting goals in the first place?

This, my friend, is where I hope to help. Because one thing I do understand—at least from a neuroscience perspective—is what the point of a goal is. And I worry that without this perspective, your goal-setting efforts are bound to feel like a wrestling match between you and your brain. After all, for every explicit goal you might hold about how you’d like to change or improve in the new year, your brain is making thousands of decisions about how to move you forward in the way that it sees fit. My new book, Learning, Knowing, and Growing, will help people understand the nature of their individual brains so that their attempts to learn and grow work with, not against, their grain. But since that won’t be hitting the shelves until sometime in 2026, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek to help supercharge your feel-good efforts for 2025. And spoiler alert—feeling better is a large part of how your brain defines success.

So how might the goals you set for yourself influence, or interact with, your brain’s ideas about how to move you forward?

You might think of any goal you hold in mind at a particular time as a type of operating principle that helps your brain assign priority to different types of information and action. And given the competition created by the 86 billion neurons carrying signals around in your brain, this prioritization can be clutch. In fact, our goals can even be used to override the well-established patterns of sensing and behaving your brain has learned. In a space where your previous experiences guide so much of your sense of what’s possible,[1] this can be an important catalyst for change.

I could write an entire book[2] about how this works in the brain, but one of my favorite neuroscientists Earl Miller did a great job in this eight-page article that changed my life. And if you’ll allow me a second for an exciting aside, I met Earl Miller in real life for the first time this year and it was one of my highlights of 2024! This selfie I took of us sums up my coolness level, or lack thereof (I’m pretty sure that my voice even cracked).

Earl Miller’s ideas about goals, in a nutshell, is that they are underpinned by a series of “rule maps” located in the prefrontal cortex that can be used to influence the way the rest of the brain works. In doing so, it essentially turns up the volume on some pieces of information, while turning down the volume on others. Remarkably, according to his estimates, each goal requires the sustained activation of about one third of the neurons in your prefrontal cortex.[3] Now if you consider the fact that at any given time, your brain is using 20% of your body’s total energy supply, and that the frontal lobes are the biggest and most energetically expensive areas in the human brain, the cost of holding these goals in mind starts to become clear.[4] And herein lies the first brain-partnership principle I’d like you to consider:

Goals are energetically expensive. Think about the number of them you’re setting, and what you’ll be putting aside as you focus on them.

This certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set any goals. After all, there’s a reason evolution selected for this big frontal lobe brain design that allows us to behave flexibly depending on them. But you should understand that because of the expense, your brain can only use a finite number of goals to guide your behavior at any given time. The maximum is probably around three for most mere mortals. So, if you’ve written down 10 things you’d like to achieve in 2025, it might help to realize that they can’t all be shaping your behavior at once. At the very least, think about the order you’d like to accomplish them in, or use external reminders that will empower you to activate specific goals at particular times and places. It’s also important to rember, however, that when you use one goal to focus your attention on some aspect of your life, you are, by definition, ignoring other aspects.

But maybe turning away from things that aren’t working for you is part of what your brain is working toward! Digging deeper into the motivation that drives your goals can offer another opportunity for partnering with your brain. Because, at the end of the day, your brain is not intrinsically interested in specific things or accomplishments. It’s motivated by the feelings that those accomplishments bring. In fact, the very neurochemical that makes us feel good—dopamine—also induces neuroplasticity that helps support change and growth! And one of the design features that sets human learning apart from our most powerful AI counterparts is that we have separate circuits that learn in parallel to move us toward things that make us feel good and away from things that make us feel bad. One of the things I find most fascinating about these dual learning routes is that individuals differ in the relative strengths of each pathway, and by extension in the degree to which they are motivated by “carrot” or by “stick”! If you’d like to explore the strength of your carrot and stick learning, you can take this test on my website.

Regardless of your intrinsic learning style, as you think about your goals for 2025, consider this second opportunity for brain partnership:

Your brain works to move you toward good feelings and away from bad ones. What are the feelings you’re looking for more or less of and how are these reflected in your goals?

How might your goals shift if they were focused on the feelings, and not your best guess about how to get, or avoid, those feelings?

And now, for my third and final point, I’m going to do something I never imagined I would do and disagree with Yoda. Remember that whole scene in The Empire Strikes Back where he’s training Luke and says gets kind of pissy and says, “No! Try not! Do. Or do not. There is no try”? As much as I appreciate the idea that there is no “one size fits all” method for mentorship that works for everyone, I think this is approach to goal setting is terrible.

In fact, if I were to name one single principle that has moved me forward the most in 2024, it’s “reward the try.” Like many of my best ideas, I got this one from the horse world, where I’m lucky enough to be able to rub elbows with some of the best horse trainers on the planet. And not only has this worked miraculously with the two young horses I have at home, it has also made all the difference in my personal life.

To understand how this works from your brain’s perspective, let’s consider two possible ways to look at your goals: the first, most traditional view of goal setting is to focus on a particular outcome that you would like to achieve and then to define success based on whether you do or do not achieve that outcome; the second approach, which I’ll advocate for here, is to understand your goal as a trajectory, and to define success by the choices you make to spend energy with that goal in mind. Using the first approach, your brain’s feel-good dopamine reward would be tied to your goal. Though some goals (e.g., losing 10 pounds or making $10,000 more dollars a year) lend themselves better to incremental signs of success than others (e.g., learning to canter under saddle with your horse), this leaves your biggest brain rewiring opportunity for the uncertain end of your journey. But if we use an approach that is more aligned with (though not exactly the same as) a growth mindset, we reinforce our efforts. In doing so, not only do we become more motivated to expend more effort in the future, we also feel good and learn more from our attempts. And this brings me to my third and final goal-setting suggestion:

Reward the tries. If possible, set goals that are more focused on the process than the outcome.

But wait, those of you with a coaching mindset might be thinking, what if the choices you’re making about how to spend your energy aren’t moving you closer to success? While it’s certainly true that sometimes the paths we choose to get where we want to go aren’t the shortest ones for getting us there, it’s also true that—as the Buddhists say—when you’re digging a well, you’re guaranteed to get nothing but dirt and rocks before you eventually discover water. What I’ve learned with my horses and my writing practice is that when I reward the try, we learn to love trying.

And I can’t think of a better gift to offer you in 2025 than that.

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[1] For more on this, see my post titled “Breaking the Brain’s Chains.”

[2] Come to think of it, the Focus and Navigate chapters in my book, The Neuroscience of You, do a pretty thorough job of this!

[3] The paper covers other important details, such as why this number is so large, and what it reflects about a tradeoff between the specificity of the jobs of PFC neurons and the remarkable flexibility in the number of different goals we can use to guide our behaviors, but I’ll save those for a future discussion!

[4] Ironically, this means that depriving the brain of glucose as we do in most diets, might also make it harder to maintain the very goals that are supporting your healthy behavior.

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