How I steered a year of goals

Sometime in 2023, the concept of a ‘Word of the Year” entered my world.

It’s a way of framing what your overarching goal for the coming year will be – you use the word as a filter to make decisions, focus your efforts and keep you on track.

For 2024, my word was assets. The goal was to build new revenue streams through productised services.

When I decided on the word, I told a few people, wrote it on a Notion page that is a kind of dashboard I look at most days, focused on it for a few months… then just kind of just kept seeing it there. I feel like the mega focus of the first few months dropped.

But looking back on the year, I realise it actually worked – I created a 1-1 coaching program that has been really fun to deliver, and am in the middle of doing the very first group version of that same program, with a rough idea of a self-paced version for 2025.

I polished a solid framework that the program sits inside of, which helps self-employed creatives build out a product ladder that aims to release the stranglehold that time has on their week.

I didn’t build the 4 other products I had on my Notion board under the word “Assets”, which is actually great. I see now that they would have been distractions from the things I did get done.

For 2025 I’ll have a new word – I considered keeping the word Assets for 2025 because that will absolutely continue, but my feeling right now is the word you select is what allows you to spend a year building the momentum, which you then carry through to the following year and stack your new word on top.

Honestly, it was a nice surprise to look back and see that the word trick actually worked. I subconsciously ran a lot of decisions through the “will this build an asset” filter, and it helped me avoid some shiny object syndrome which I’m very prone to.