🤸 Make goals fun
- John J D Munn
- Jan 14
- 4 min read
Remember: Goals don't have to suck.
Goals don’t have to be boring, serious, stale. You can add fun things in there. In fact, I strongly encourage it.
Here are some of my favourite fun goals:
🍝 Pasta quest: Eat as many different pasta shapes as possible within the space of one year.
🌍 Global Grub Hunt: Try a random country's cuisine every month. Use a random country generator, then Google or ChatGPT to find a dish that the country is famous for that you will make. Great for date nights. I am doing this this year. In January we got Kenya, you can see a picture from our meal later in this email.
📖 Book Bingo: Create a bingo card with different genres or authors or demographics of writers (e.g. female authors only, or people from different countries, etc) and challenge yourself to complete it by the end of the year.
💌Client Appreciation Surprise: Surprise one client each month with a thoughtful gift, handwritten note, or unexpected bonus to strengthen relationships and create memorable moments. This is one of the most underrated and most powerful ways to build relationships with clients, generate referrals, and retain happy people.
🤿 Archive Dive: Spend time each month learning a quirky piece of history, trivia, or folklore about your city and document it in a fun way (blog post, Instagram story, etc.).
💃🎵 Movement abroad: Learn a different type of dance or movement style from different countries each month, like salsa, ballet, tai chi, or Bollywood, either through a local class or online tutorials like YouTube.
You can do the same global discovery thing by listening to different music from around the world.
😋 Try 40 new foods: It really pushes you out of your comfort zone and you will discover so many new things. I managed to try 60 different things last year alone!
🎟️ Networking Bingo: Set a goal to find certain criteria when networking with new contacts each month through events, LinkedIn, or mutual connections.
📷 Photo Scavenger Hunt: Create a list of 12 themes (like “reflections,” “shadows,” or “circles”) and capture a photo for each throughout the year.
🕵️♂️ Find fifty things: Find and catalogue fifty different interesting or different things throughout the year. It could be a different kind of plant or mushroom while on a walk, or a geocache hidden in your city, a piece of street art you’ve never noticed before, an unusual book in a secondhand store, a cool rock or fossil at the beach, an antique at a flea market, or even a quirky menu item at a local restaurant.
Pasta quest: fun resolutions
Not everything has to be deathly serious. I like to remember to give myself space
and time to enjoy life, not just to “complete it”.
Our attempt at making the Kenyan dishes of Sukuma Wiki (the green stuff) and Ugali (the yellow stuff). P.s. Yes, that is a RockBand drumkit in the background, alongside Kenyan dinner, I spent the weekend jamming out in a fake band with my friends. It was wonderful.
Let me leave you with this comic on the topic…
Are you familiar with doing whatever the fuck you want? You run your life,
you even run the business, you’re the boss!!
💡 Quote I'm pondering
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up” - C.S. Lewis
Sometimes, the most adult thing you can do is to fully embrace being a child.
Do the things you enjoy without worrying what other people think or judge you for.
Be you. With the rise of AI originality is in dwindling supply. Be you. The world will reward you for it.
🆕 My “Past Year Review”.
A “Past Year Review” has been the most effective exercise I have discovered for moving my life forward and making me happier.
I originally discovered it thanks to a share from Tim Ferriss, and now both my partner and I complete our own past year reviews annually.
The exercise is simple to do and doesn’t take long, but it does require some radical honesty that can feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the insights you gather are extremely powerful.
You can get the template I use every year, including detailed instructions and examples to help you, on an entirely Pay As You Feel basis here:
I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-january-15-2025
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When you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help you:
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