PDF Summary:Your Best Year Ever, by Michael Hyatt

A new year starts, and we have our resolutions, vision boards, and brand-new planners ready to go. But 12 months later, how many of us have accomplished our goals and resolutions? Not many. But we’re not doomed to fail; according to Michael Hyatt, we just need a system that works. His five-step process for setting and pursuing goals can help break the spell of elusive New Year’s resolutions and set you up for your best year yet.

Hyatt is a New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and podcast host who advises readers and listeners on how to win at work and at life. Our guide explains Hyatt’s philosophy for success and teaches you how to follow his five steps. We complement Hyatt’s ideas with those of other productivity and self-improvement experts, like Sahil Bloom, Tony Robbins, and Charles Duhigg.

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Hyatt provides an exercise to process your past experiences in which you analyze the New Year’s resolutions you set for the previous year.

1. Describe what you wanted to see happen. For example, identify your original goals for the year across all 10 life domains. How did you envision the year progressing? Note that it’s normal to have an emotional reaction to this step, such as feeling disappointed.
2. Describe the accomplishments and moments that made you proud. Stating your successes helps you acknowledge the power you have over your life.
3. Describe your disappointments and the instances that make you feel regret.
4. Identify two or three recurring themes that capture how your year went.
5. Ask yourself what you can learn from both your accomplishments and your disappointments. Summarize each lesson with a brief statement you can easily remember in the future. For example, “Make contingency plans for any big decisions.”
6. Decide how you’ll change your behavior. For each lesson, choose a concrete change you can make so things go differently next time. For example, the lesson above might need a rule where you don’t make any big decisions without writing down contingency plans for all the risks you can envision ahead of time.

More Tools for Analyzing Your Past Experiences

Two complementary approaches can enhance the quality of your reflection at different stages of Hyatt’s exercise.

In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz argues that negative feelings are not an accurate read of reality but a product of habitual thought patterns. He writes that the solution is to replace emotional reactions with rational, fact-based thinking. The more you free yourself from responding to and identifying with negative thoughts—by deliberately creating successful feedback loops like a machine—the more likely you are to develop a happy and successful state of mind. This process can also prevent negative past experiences from turning into mental roadblocks as you plan your future.

In Insight, Tasha Eurich argues that self-awareness depends heavily on the type of questions you ask yourself. Specifically, what questions lead to solutions, while why questions keep you stuck ruminating on the failure.

Here’s how both approaches support Hyatt’s six steps:

• Describe what you wanted to happen: Maltz recommends stripping emotional language from your description and stating only the facts, which prevents the disappointment Hyatt flags as normal from distorting the rest of the reflection before it has even begun.

• Describe your accomplishments: Maltz writes that you should note the specific action that made each accomplishment possible, which deepens Hyatt’s goal of using this step to recognize your own agency. This upgrades a general acknowledgment to a concrete, repeatable insight.

• Describe your disappointments and regrets: Maltz suggests writing only what happened and then asking what the actual cause was. This can keep you from focusing on self-criticism rather than the learning opportunity Hyatt intends you to find.

• Identify recurring themes: Following Maltz’s advice to limit the emotional weight of this exercise, state each theme as an observable pattern rather than a judgment. This can help ensure the themes you take to the lesson-extraction step are factual.

• Extract lessons: Eurich recommends asking “What would need to be different?” before summarizing each lesson. This directs attention toward solutions rather than fault and produces more actionable takeaways than a “why”-based review would.

• Decide how to change your behavior: Eurich suggests framing each behavioral change as a “What will I do differently?” statement. This can keep Hyatt’s final step oriented toward forward action rather than backward analysis.

Step 3: Plan Your Year

After examining your past, it’s time to plan your future. Write down your goals so they give you clarity as the year progresses. Having your goals written down can motivate you and highlight your progress. It can also help you filter opportunities as they arise, depending on whether they’ll impact your goals.

(Shortform note: In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins agrees that writing goals down and keeping them visible is essential for clarity and motivation. He explains that regularly reviewing written goals engages your brain’s reticular activating system, training it to notice relevant opportunities—the filtering effect Hyatt describes. Robbins adds that pairing this with daily visualization exercises, where you imagine what it will feel like to achieve your goals, deepens your motivation by conditioning your nervous system to associate goals with the pleasure of achievement.)

Hyatt recommends setting seven to 10 goals across multiple life domains and focusing on no more than three per quarter. To make your goals effective, he suggests following the SMARTER framework, which expands on the traditional SMART goals. First, recall the SMART criteria:

Specific goals increase your focus, creativity, and persistence.

Measurable goals have a quantifiable way to track progress and define success. When you track your progress, Hyatt recommends that you look at both the distance ahead and what you’ve accomplished. For example, if your goal is to visit 10 countries, and you’ve visited three so far, visibly track and celebrate those three at the same time that you plan how to visit the remaining seven.

Actionable goals start with an action verb telling you exactly what you need to achieve.

Relevant goals make sense with your current interests, needs, and possibilities.

Time-bound goals have deadlines or start dates, depending on whether you’re setting achievement goals or habit goals. Achievement goals target one-time accomplishments with deadlines, such as “Buy a house by the end of the year.” Habit goals establish ongoing practices with start dates, such as “Do a two-minute meditation every day for 30 days, starting tomorrow.” Habit goals need a start date (tomorrow), a frequency (every day), and a streak target (30 days). Consider that even achievement goals will need habits to support them. For example, “Working on my side business for three hours every day for six months” can help you achieve the goal of buying a house.

Hyatt identifies two additional features that make goals even smarter:

• Exciting goals inspire you and help you enjoy the process of pursuing them. One way to build excitement into your goals is to turn them into a game. Track your streaks using an app or a planner and challenge yourself to reach higher numbers.

(Shortform note: In Actionable Gamification, Yu-Kai Chou writes that another way to build excitement is to add negative motivations—ones that make you feel pressured or compelled to take an action. For example, a countdown calendar might make a goal more stressful but also exciting, and lead to a greater feeling of accomplishment if you beat the calendar.)

• Risky goals motivate growth by stretching you just beyond your current capabilities. Hyatt recommends avoiding goals that are too realistic because they won’t push you to grow and to achieve all you’re capable of. Instead, set a goal that feels impossible, then soften it so you feel uncomfortable with the challenge but not overwhelmed.

Another Way to Approach SMART and Risky Goals

In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg structures the relationship between challenging and practical goals differently. Both authors agree that goals should be SMART, but they have different understandings of what the A in the acronym stands for. While Hyatt says goals should be actionable, Duhigg argues they should be achievable and realistic. So, while Hyatt treats realism as a ceiling to push against, Duhigg thinks it’s a standard to meet.

This difference affects how the two authors frame the role of ambition in effective goal-setting. Hyatt argues all goals should be ambitious and builds that into his SMARTER framework as the risky component. But Duhigg treats ambitious goals as a separate category: stretch goals. These goals sit above SMART goals and give them their direction; they prevent SMART goals from becoming an exercise in cognitive closure, which he defines as the tendency to set easy, quickly completable goals simply for the satisfaction of finishing them. This is a similar risk Hyatt warns against when he says some goals can be “too realistic.”

Duhigg adds that stretch goals and SMART goals work best in combination, with the stretch goal providing purpose and the SMART goals providing the actionable path toward it. Hyatt’s SMARTER framework collapses this two-tier structure into a single goal-setting exercise.

Step 4: Leap Into Action

Now that you’ve set your goals, it’s time to get started. Hyatt argues that setting your goals will give you an initial kick of motivation, but that doesn’t last very long. He cites the Law of Diminishing Intent: The longer you wait to act, the less likely you are to do so. The delay diminishes your intention because it allows your initial motivation to fade and any doubts to strengthen.

(Shortform note: The Law of Diminishing Intent was coined by Jim Rohn, a self-improvement pioneer who mentored authors like Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy. The concept was popularized by leadership expert John C. Maxwell who argues that there’s a deadline to your intent: 48 hours. If you wait any longer than that, you’re much less likely to move forward on your initial motivation.)

The LEAP Principle

To counter the Law of Diminishing Intent, Hyatt proposes the LEAP Principle, which can help you combine honest reflection with decisive action.

• Lean into the changes you need to make in your life. Don’t shy away from reality.
• Engage—reflect on what you need to do until you’re clear on it.
• Act—take the next step. It doesn’t have to be the perfect next step; it just needs to move you forward.
• Pounce and do it now. Don’t let time wear down your goals.

Act Now, But Ensure It’s Necessary, Not Impulsive

Jack Canfield (The Success Principles) adds context to why immediate action is so difficult to take. He agrees with Hyatt that delay is the primary enemy of follow-through. While Hyatt frames this as the Law of Diminishing Intent, Canfield identifies the specific thought patterns that produce it: You over-refine a plan instead of starting it, wait for perfect conditions that never arrive, and let fear of failure stop you from taking action. This might feel contradictory since Hyatt suggests you reflect on what you need to do until you’re sure about the next step—but the reflection should only be about the very next step you can take now. As soon as you can identify a good-enough next step, it’s time to stop reflecting and start acting.

Additionally, Canfield extends Hyatt’s thinking by explaining what acting imperfectly produces. Even if your next step isn’t ideal, it shows others you’re committed, which can help draw their support. It also provides you with practical knowledge you can only gain by doing, as well as feedback that makes the path forward clearer.

And, if the path to a goal is genuinely unclear, Canfield's advice provides guidance by mirroring Hyatt’s LEAP principle: Move anyway, treat obstacles as course corrections rather than stop signs, and stay open to discovering a better destination than the one you originally had in mind.

Take the Next Step

According to Hyatt, spending too much time planning can be a form of procrastination. You can obsess over designing the perfect plan, yet make no real progress toward your goals. Instead of making an elaborate plan, Hyatt says you should identify only the next step you need to take. In fact, if you’ve chosen an appropriately risky goal, you won’t be able to see many steps ahead—the path will open as you start walking on it. Pick the easiest next action and block time for it on your calendar.

Hyatt reminds you that getting stuck is normal. If it happens, get help. Find an expert, read a book, hire a service—anything to get you unstuck and moving toward the next step.

Crossing the Desert One Step at a Time

In Eat That Frog!, Brian Tracy illustrates this same step-by-step strategy with an anecdote: Years ago, over a thousand people would die annually traveling through the Tanezrouft, one of the most desolate areas of the Sahara desert, because blowing sand obscured the trail. To solve this problem, French colonists placed large black barrels every five kilometers along the trail, enabling travelers to navigate by focusing on reaching one barrel at a time.

The anecdote captures Hyatt’s core argument: When a task reaches a certain size, it becomes impossible to plan out the entire process ahead of time. When your plan involves unknown variables or complex moving parts, the only thing you can do is take the first step and have faith that the next step will reveal itself.

Further, Tracy explains the psychological mechanism that makes the next-step approach sustainable: Humans have a built-in need for closure, and completing each small step triggers a release of endorphins that builds momentum toward the next one. This gives Hyatt’s scheduling recommendation an additional rationale: Blocking time for the next step creates a repeating cycle of small completions that sustains motivation over the long haul.

Finally, Tracy’s Sahara anecdote reframes getting stuck as an inherent feature of ambitious goals, which reinforces Hyatt’s reminder that needing help when you’re stuck is normal and is something to be overcome, not labeled as a failure.

Step 5: Sustain Your Efforts

By now, you’re probably in the thick of pursuing your goals. But as we’ve seen above, your motivation can wane, and obstacles will come up. Hyatt offers five strategies for sustaining your effort throughout the year.

Strategy #1: Understand Your Motivators

Hyatt says it’s normal to want to quit. But, you can increase your ability to stay the course by clarifying the inner motivation driving you. He argues that external motivators, like a new title or recognition from loved ones, don’t sustain motivation. Instead, identify the hopes and values that drive you to pursue your goals. Write them down, rank them according to their importance, and then focus on the top three.

For your top three motivators, reflect on why they matter. Consider both rational and emotional reasons for each motivator. For example, if one of your motivators is to create a strong financial foundation for your children, your rational reason might be that people with a strong financial basis tend to do better in life. Your emotional reason might be that you struggled when you were growing up, and you don’t want your children to go through the same.

A Layered Approach to Motivation

In Limitless, Jim Kwik agrees with Hyatt’s emphasis on inner motivation, arguing that surface-level rewards are insufficient to sustain effort over time and that lasting motivation requires connecting to something personally meaningful. Kwik extends Hyatt’s argument by breaking inner motivation into four distinct layers:

• Purpose: Hyatt frames purpose as the hopes and values driving a goal, while Kwik narrows it to a specific question: What are your goals, and how will you work toward them?

• Passion: Hyatt includes emotional reasons in his motivator reflection, while Kwik treats passion as its own category, pointing to it as the underlying excitement that makes you want to work in the first place.

• Reasons: While Hyatt asks readers to articulate rational and emotional reasons for each motivator, Kwik sees reasons as something more immediate and situational. He believes they’re the specific trigger that gets you moving on any given day, when your broader purpose feels abstract.

• Values: Kwik distinguishes between means values, which are instrumental steps toward something else, and end values, which are meaningful in themselves. This can help you avoid anchoring your motivation to a value like recognition, which actually points toward a deeper need, such as belonging or confidence.

Strategy #2: Schedule Check-Ins

Hyatt recommends setting three types of self-check-ins:

• 20-minute weekly check-in: Re-read your top three motivations. Review the past week using the steps outlined in Step 2 above. Define three key outcomes you’ll target the following week.
• One-minute daily check-in: Choose three actions you can take today to make progress toward the three key outcomes you identified in your weekly check-in.
• 2-hour quarterly check-in: For each goal, celebrate any accomplishments. Reassess any goals you haven’t accomplished yet to see whether they were too risky or not relevant to your current situation. Decide whether to recommit to the goal, redefine it, or replace it with a different goal.

Powerful Questions for Your Self-Checkins

In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins complements Hyatt’s check-in structure by adding a question-driven layer. He recommends that you ask yourself a series of Power Questions every day, which can help you engage in the three types of review Hyatt proposes:

20-minute weekly check-in: Robbins suggests closing out your day with a set of Evening Power Questions, such as, “What have I learned today?” and “How can my experiences today improve my future?” Making these questions habitual can make your weekly review easier because you’ve been gathering material for it all week.

One-minute daily check-in: Robbins’ Morning Power Questions set a productive direction for the day, similar to Hyatt’s daily actions. These questions include, “What in my life excites me?” and “What in my life am I committed to?” Robbins recommends elaborating on each answer, adding how it makes you feel and why, to deepen your reflection beyond simply listing tasks.

2-hour quarterly check-in: Robbins’ problem-solving questions may be particularly helpful as you reassess any unmet goals. They provide a structured approach to working through Hyatt’s decision on whether to recommit, redefine, or replace a goal. This can shift your mindset from disappointment about what wasn’t achieved to curiosity about what you can learn and adjust going forward:

• What’s good about this problem?

• What still needs improvement?

• What am I willing to do to improve the situation?

• What am I willing to stop doing to improve the situation?

• How can I enjoy the resolution process?

Strategy #3: Establish If/Then Actions

Obstacles are unavoidable. Hyatt recommends anticipating them so they don’t derail you. Think about the obstacles you’re likely to face and decide on an easy action you can take if one arises. For example, imagine you set out to learn a new language. You might anticipate being too busy to attend your lessons during the week. Think of this obstacle in if/then language: If I’m too busy to attend lessons during the week, then I’llfor weekend lessons instead. Hyatt notes that you can apply this technique to the technique itself: If you realize that an if/then action isn’t working, then tweak it until you find a system that works.

However, don’t confuse if/then actions with backup plans that outline what you’ll do if your goal doesn’t work out or if they become too difficult. According to Hyatt, fallbacks make it mentally easier for you to give up.

Three Types of Obstacles

If you’re struggling to come up with if/then actions, you might want to consider Canfield’s taxonomy of challenges. In The Success Principles, he identifies three types of obstacles worth planning for, which can make it easier to identify and prepare for obstacles:

Reasons: Once you write a goal, you may find yourself thinking of reasons not to pursue it. For example, if you’re trying to increase your monthly sales, you may think it’s impossible because you’ve maxed out your current sales territory. An effective if/then action here addresses the objection directly, such as, “If I find myself thinking my sales territory is maxed out, then I’ll research one new prospecting channel.”

Worries: Worries are negative emotions that surface for you when thinking about a goal. For example, you might worry that you’ll fail, or that launching a business will consume your savings. An if/then action for a worry is less about solving a problem and more about interrupting a spiral. You might say, “If I start catastrophizing about losing my savings, then I’ll remind myself of my financial safety buffer.”

Life obstacles: Life obstacles are things that happen to you once you start pursuing a goal that make it hard to pursue. For example, you may discover that your government doesn’t allow you to run your business as you planned. An if/then action here should focus on who to contact or what alternative path to explore. You might decide that, “If a regulatory barrier blocks my original plan, then I’ll identify one decision-maker who has the authority to help.”

Keep in mind that reasons and worries can masquerade as evidence that a goal is unachievable, making it tempting to treat them as justifications for quitting rather than as triggers to activate a pre-planned response. Try to be vigilant so you don’t create fallback plans when you identify these kinds of obstacles.

Strategy #4: Rely On Your People

Hyatt emphasizes that no one achieves success on their own. Having a supportive community around you can bring you important benefits:

• Your community will support you when you’re thinking of quitting and will keep you accountable if you’re not committing to your goals.
• You can learn from the experience of others who’ve gone down similar paths.
• You can engage in a healthy competition to bring out the best in each other.

To make sure you have the right community, Hyatt suggests you share your goals with people who will keep you accountable. However, be discriminating in who you choose to tell, and don’t go around telling everyone you know about your goal—sharing your goal gives you an easy boost of endorphins that can keep you from actually doing the work.

How People Can Help or Hinder Your Goals

Psychologists argue that social dynamics impact our ability to pursue our goals because they directly affect our willpower—the ability to resist short-term temptations and stay committed to long-term objectives. In The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal explains that both positive and negative behaviors spread through social networks—if your friend pursues ambitious goals, you’re more likely to do the same. Conversely, if your friend abandons a major life goal, you’re more likely to give up on yours as well.

These insights suggest that the benefits of a supportive community are enhanced through reciprocity. When you celebrate someone’s progress or help them stay accountable, you reinforce their willpower while also boosting your own commitment to your goals. This is because of social proof, the psychological phenomenon where we look to others’ behavior to guide our own actions. In this way, you can leverage healthy competition to lift up both you and your friends, and to find opportunities to share your past experience with others who might be going down similar paths today.

However, in some ways, social dynamics can also hinder your goals, reinforcing Hyatt’s suggestion that you shouldn’t tell just anyone about your goals, even people who can help keep you accountable. According to McGonigal, if you tell your friends you’re going to accomplish a goal, your brain feels the pleasure of this accomplishment even as you speak the words. But since your brain has already registered this pleasure, you lose the motivation to do it. To eliminate this possibility, many scientists believe it’s more productive to keep your goals to yourself until after you’ve achieved them.

Strategy #5: Practice Gratitude

According to Hyatt, gratitude can help you achieve your goals. First, it shows you that positive changes can happen—you just need a bit of patience. Second, it reminds you of your past accomplishments and of how much control you have over your life. Finally, it focuses you on what’s already going well in your life rather than on what you’re lacking.

Hyatt suggests several ways to practice gratitude:

• Integrate a gratitude prayer into your daily routine, such as at the start of your day or before meals.
• Start a gratitude journal to create a written record you can reference during hard times.
• Imagine what your life would be like if you lost something you value. This exercise can help you appreciate the parts of life that have become routine.

More Ways to Access Gratitude

Gretchen Rubin’s advice in The Happiness Project supports Hyatt’s reasons for practicing gratitude. She agrees that gratitude shifts focus from what’s lacking to what’s already good, and adds that it also reduces envy, increases generosity, and improves relationships by making forgiveness easier. This reinforces Hyatt’s point that gratitude builds a more stable foundation for pursuing goals.

Rubin also suggests gratitude practices that complement Hyatt’s suggestions:

• Embrace spirituality: Rubin doesn’t prescribe praying as explicitly as Hyatt, but she writes that every day, you should be thankful for what you have in a way that recognizes the spiritual nature of the world; research has shown people who consider themselves spiritual are happier, healthier, and have better relationships.

• Keep a gratitude log: Rubin’s log mirrors Hyatt’s journal recommendation, and she offers specific guidance on sustaining it. Start by listing three things daily, and focus on small and easily overlooked things rather than obvious blessings.

• Imagine loss: This practice extends Hyatt’s advice. Rubin characterizes contemplating loss—thinking about death and catastrophe—as examining life’s fragility. She argues it serves two purposes beyond gratitude: It makes minor irritations easier to brush off, and it builds the mental resilience needed to navigate real catastrophe when it arrives. Rubin notes that the form this practice takes will vary for each person. It could be reading memoirs, spending time in nature, or studying religious texts, for example.