How to Realistically Achieve All Your Goals in 2026

If you have big dreams and set goals every year but don't often achieve them, the missing piece isn't actually setting more goals, it's building better systems. So it's not about discipline or just working harder, it's actually about creating smart systems that work better than you ever could alone. So in this video I'll go over the reverse design approach to creating systems that actually make your dream life a reality. If you're new here my name is Izzy, I'm a mum, tech founder, and Cambridge trained doctor, and on this channel we explore these strategies and mindsets to help you fulfill your potential in life. And if there's one thing that's made the biggest difference in my ability to actually achieve my goals, it's what I'm about to share with you. So let's dive into the reverse design method. Here's the thing to really understand. Goals and dreams are emotion and motivation driven. They're great for figuring out when you're feeling like you're visualizing your dream state, you feel so excited and happy and joyful thinking about that, but systems on the other hand are actually execution driven. They are the practical bridge of steps and actions that you take to get you from A to B. An example in terms of traveling is you can really really want to visit Japan let's say, but if you don't have a plane ticket or another vehicle or a boat to actually get you there, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. You need to want it to then make a decision and then take action. So the logical flow goes a bit like this. You have a dream which leads you to take a decision, which then leads you to take action. If all you have is that dream and you don't actually make an active decision or an action, it's kind of unlikely that something's going to magically fall in your lap. And so how we want to think about this is your goal, your dream is the final destination that sets your direction. It sets your compass. So instead of going in like this direction or this direction, you're going in this direction because you know that's the direction of your dream. But then systems are the vehicle that will get you there. So the car, the plane, the boat, the bicycle, the method through which you're actually going to go from now to dream. And so where I like to start this process is actually by defining that direction. Defining what I like to call your carrot and stick. So you've probably heard the analogy of a donkey with carrot in front of it, which it's trying to run ahead to try to eat. And on the other end, a stick that is used to hit it on the butt to encourage it to move faster. And in the psychological literature, these two types of motivation are also known as approach motivation and avoidance motivation. Approach motivation is when you're attracted towards wanting something positive, such as the donkey really wanting to eat the carrot that's being dangled in front of it. For example, maybe you want to go to the gym because you want to get strong, look great, feel energetic, be healthy. Avoidance motivation, on the other hand, is when you're driven to move away from negative outcomes. So the flip side of the gym example in avoidance motivation terms is I want to go to the gym because if I don't go to the gym, I'm more likely to either stay obese or feel unhealthy and get sick more often and have low energy. And while the psychological literature generally supports approach motivation as a more positive form of motivation that's more effective, avoidance motivation is also really useful to understand. And so by identifying both the carrot and the stick, this helps to add even more fuel and clarity in our goal setting to really get that sense of, OK, what direction are we going in? What does our heart really want? So for this step, I like to dream divergently firstly about what I might want in the next three years of my life and write out a massive list of literally everything that I can think of and then put these in a rough order of priority, how much I really, really want them. And then from this list, I like to journal about who I want to become and then also create a vision board. I actually made a whole video walking you through exactly how I create my vision boards and how you could create one for yourself as well. If you want to check it out, I'll leave a link somewhere up here. Then I visualize and write out the opposite. What would happen if I didn't work on my goals and continue drifting through life without actually taking action? So the anti-dream life, a structure that I really like to help think through what my goals are and what I actually want from my life is the wheel of life. And I talk about this a lot and I've actually made a completely free template that you can download if you like. I'll leave a link down below. And I like to split it up into eight key sections of physical health, mental health, friends and family, romance, career, finances, personal growth and purpose and spirit. So broadly mirroring the health, relationships, hustle and personal categories. So take a little bit of time to define what the dream and anti-dream states are for each of these categories. And once you've done this, we actually get into the reverse designing your life. And this is the step where we really bring in the systematization. A lot of people get stuck when they set a goal because they don't design backwards from their dream state. Because let's say if you imagine right now that you are on riverbank A and you want to get to riverbank B, which is your dream outcome, there are multiple paths to get to any goal. You could swim across the river, you could build a boat or a raft or you could use a bridge, you could even take a helicopter or a plane or go all the way around the river and hike through the mountains to go to the source of the river and come back around. So once you've decided where you want to go, the next step is actually mapping out the path there. And this is why I like setting a vision for the dream life which is actually a three-year vision and then quarterly goal setting for milestones towards that. Because setting yearly goals is often a bit too long to maintain momentum and too short to make real big life pivots. They talk about this very phenomenon in the 12-week year book where they found that actually 12 weeks, which is about 90 days, about three months, about one quarter, is a great duration to maintain that momentum yet also allow enough time for meaningful progress. And so again coming back to this trip planning analogy, you have an overall vision for why you want to go on a trip, which is often a feeling or a wish for a certain experience, and then you have the key milestones and destinations within the trip which are like little goals. So maybe you want to see this specific temple or you want to go to this museum. And then to get to those you need to have a path which is hopefully an enjoyable efficient path to actually get there and this is your action plan. And so this means setting a broad vision for your life and then setting mid-term goals within that such as every quarter. If you've been following me for a while now you'll know I basically organize my entire life both personal and professional and business using Notion who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Recently I've been doing some planning for our Lifestyle Business Academy which is a program that my husband Ali and I created where we're aiming to help people get started with their own lifestyle business. Starting up a new program has meant quite a lot of planning and figuring out all the different moving parts between planning out the curriculum, tracking student progress, and managing cohorts has been a lot to do and a year ago we would have had to manually create databases to keep tabs on everything which could take me hours or sometimes even days to really complete and build out systems. But thankfully this time around I have Notion Agent to help me out which means that now whipping up entire databases and updating them can happen just with a single prompt and a click of a button. One of the best things is that you can customize your Notion Agent who can learn exactly how you work and tailor it to your personal style so I've named mine Graham and he is a total whiz when it comes to using Notion. He knows my Notion inside out and since he's connected to tools like my Gmail, Google Drive, Slack, even the web he can find pretty much whatever I ask him to and so my Notion Agent can complete tasks end to end for me and the key here is he's not just telling me what to do like a kind of how-to guide he's actually figuring out what needs to be done and then just executing on it and doing it in Notion himself and so how I describe it is almost like having a teammate who just gets it and gets things done. So if you're looking for a Notion super user to take your new year goals and systems to the next level you can check out Notion Agent for free via the link in my description below. So now let's talk about how to reverse systematize your dream life. Systematization at its core is where you stop being the machine that's just working harder but actually just build the machine to make success inevitable and so your job becomes oversight and improvement of the system of the machine rather than you manually doing the work yourself. So let's get into the four steps to reverse design and systematize your dream life. I like to go through this every quarter so every three months so that I can really lock in on whatever goal I'm focusing on at that point in time and actually build systems that make meaningful progress towards that. Step one is focus and this is about focusing on between one to a maximum of three goals because science shows that focusing on too many things at once actually dilutes your effectiveness and makes it less likely that you're actually going to have cut through on anything at all. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a point. So let's just take this example of let's say we're trying to go in this direction. If you focus on too many things at the same time it scatters your attention and means that any systems that you're trying to build you can only dedicate a tiny amount of attention and energy to it and so actually you're unlikely to make as much progress. If on the other hand you are going to focus on just one thing and optimizing the system to get you from here to there and dedicating all of your energy thinking about it constantly you're just going to make so much more momentum on that and the gains from focus aren't just linear they're exponential. If you're focusing on just one thing versus many things you are exponentially more effective at actually making progress because you're not having to task switch or think about all the different things that are going on because there is a tax on our attention when we are splitting it across multiple things where there also has to be attention going to figuring out what thing to be working on. If you're just focusing on one thing you don't have to worry about switching priorities. The second step is to define. Define what your end state is after 90 days. So define this goal. What actually is the end state that you actually want to be in? And try to define this as quantitatively as possible. Try to use numbers so you know exactly what you're aiming for. And the third step is to reverse design your plan of action. Once you know your goal then you do this whole reverse designing for your system and you figure out all the steps that will go before actually achieving your goal. You also figure out how are you going to fit all of those into 90 days. For example in my own life maybe I have the goal to grow on YouTube so for example hit 850,000 subscribers. If that's the goal where am I right now? Well I'm at about 785,000 subscribers so I need to gain 65,000 subscribers in that time. That means that each month I would be gaining about 22,000 subscribers which is a lot of new subscribers. And as a side note if you've enjoyed this video so far and you want to help me hit this goal please feel free to hit the subscribe button down below. And so what does this subscriber goal actually require? Well it requires getting videos picked up by the algorithm and shown to a new audience. And how do we increase the chances of that? By consistently publishing banger high quality YouTube videos with great packaging that gets clicked on and then delivers on the promise. So people see my videos and then they choose to stay because they feel like they actually got a lot of value from them. And so there are two levers here that we need to pull there's quality and consistency. Once we've identified that we then figure out okay what is a system that can help to build on these two levers that we need. For consistency this might look like building a content system for our workflow that makes consistency effortless. And over the years I've built out this system but another key is continued oversight and improvement. So for this quarter actually one of my key milestones is to revamp my YouTube playbook and the whole system for my team to work together effectively on creating content. The second lever for my goal is quality of YouTube videos. And this means constantly reading, learning new things, experimenting in my own life and business and reflecting on it to then refine the video creation process in terms of the planning, the frameworks, the research, the editing and more. And so there's the learning side of things of refilling my own well and refining my own thinking and testing these things out in my own life and so actually making the space for that and systematizing that. So actually I block out a learning block in my calendar every week for me to literally do just that. And the second half is refining the video creation process to improve the quality. And so this means actually building into the content workflow feedback loops for planning, for frameworks, for editing. And this brings us on to the fourth and final stage which is systemize. Because now we know the goal and the plan in terms of the milestones and the steps we need to go from A to B, we need to build out the systems. And so here's to decide how much attention and time you're dedicating to something and the key repeated activities that you're investing that time and attention into which will most move the needle to get you towards your goal. I like to use the mental framework of the 168 hour week. Essentially there are 168 hours every single week and doing a bit of a time audit of okay where am I actually currently spending all of those 168 hours and writing this down gives you a lot of clarity over where you're currently spending your attention. I like to do this and then compare this data to how I would like to spend my ideal week. And once I've identified any differences I can start making intentional changes in those specific areas to get me closer to my ideal week and how I'm dedicating and spending my attention. If you'd like free access to the google sheet that I use for this template which automatically calculates and adds everything up I'll leave a link down below so you can start time tracking too. Gaining mastery over adding and removing friction in different areas of your life is a key part of building systems in your life. And this essentially means you remove friction from the things that you want to happen and you add friction to things that you don't want to happen. So coming back to this youtube example I want to reduce friction for being able to be consistent for my youtube channel. This might mean always having my youtube filming setup up and ready to go. Or on the flip side for example one of my goals is eating less sugar and so increasing the friction to actually access sugary snacks could look like having no sugary snacks in the house. This means I would have to literally go outside to the supermarket and buy a sugary snack in order to be able to eat it. Setting high quality defaults in our life is so powerful and this requires deciding in advance. Let's say if you want to be consistent in the gym this is something that I've been working on. I want to go to the gym three times a week and I've decided in advance what workout I'm doing, which exercises, how many sets and how many reps and I've also blocked it into my calendar. And so on the day I like to listen to my body and I can tweak exactly what I do based on my actual energy and physical state but there is a high quality default that I've decided on in advance. I've decided the time when I'm doing the workout, I've decided what I'm doing in the gym and I've also even decided the clothes that I'm going to wear because my default is I put out my clothes the night before. And all of this helps to eliminate any decision friction because then on the day I need to decide when, what and how I'm doing my workout. So by systematizing in advance and pre-filling in my workout into my workout tracker app as a template I reduce the friction to just getting to executing on it and executing on it just becomes a matter of actually like following the steps that I have already planned out. Automation is another one of your best friends here. This means figuring out any of the tasks that you usually do which can just be put on autopilot. So one example is when I decided I want to start investing my money I initially tried doing this manually but I realized quite quickly that I could automate this and just put it on autopilot and so as soon as money landed in my bank account I set up an automatic transfer to happen from my main bank account into my investment account and then in my investment account I set up an automatic investment into a basket of ETFs and stocks and shares that I had already pre-selected. And this means that every month it automatically did this without me having to even think about it or remember it. So those are the four stages of actually doing the reverse design for your system and by following these stages I hope that you'll be in a much better position to actually build the solid systems you need to achieve your goals and create your dream life. The most important thing is to actually take action on what you've watched in this video today. It's all good and well just watching personal development videos but they don't actually change anything unless you take action. And so one mini micro system that I would suggest is as soon as you watch a video about how to improve your life or change your life take just literally like 10 seconds at the end of the video and decide on at least two action points and write them down somewhere in either your to-do list or send them to a friend or write them in the comments or send an email and if you enjoyed this video you might want to check out this one over here which YouTube thinks you'll like. Thank you so much for watching, take care of yourself and remember that the journey is the destination. I'll see you in the next video, bye!