2025 Goals Accountability: The Return of the Good, the Meh, and the Ugly

As I did last year, I wanted to give an update on how I did on my various goals for the year. I’ve found that knowing I’m going to be giving a public accounting of my progress provides a little extra incentive to “lock in”.

As with last year, my thirteen goals were focused on four areas: spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual. This is based on my church’s Children and Youth goal-setting program, modeled after the New Testament scripture Luke 2:52:

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.

As with last year, I’m dividing the results of my thirteen goals into three categories:

• The Good: Goals that I either completely achieved or came very close.
• The Meh: Goals that I made some useful progress on but did not achieve.
• The Ugly: Goals that I made little or not progress on.

The Good…

First off, starting with the goals I did well on:

• Help Jonny head out on his mission successfully (2/13): At the time I was setting my goals for 2025, Jonny had already received his calling to serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, assigned to the California Los Angeles Mission. Jonny is our first one to head out on a mission, and some things have changed in the quarter century since Tiff and I served, so there was a little bit of a learning curve involved. Probably the biggest misadventure was that we didn’t realize Jonny needed his wisdom teeth removed until about a month before his February mission start date. The earliest we were able to schedule him for the wisdom tooth removal was a few days into his one week of “Home MTC” (some initial missionary training and orientation they now do from home via Zoom before they fly out to one of the actual Missionary Training Centers). By the time he was supposed to fly out, he was still recovering, so they gave us an extra few days to get there, but in the end I ended up renting a car and driving him out to Provo, UT. We got to drive through a blizzard between Park City and Provo, and Jonny misunderstood the eating instructions so ended up getting very green about the gills, but we were able to get him there by the deadline. He’s now been out in L.A. for almost a year, and has served in the San Fernando Valley, as well as down near LAX. Going into 2026, Jamie has submitted his mission papers, and we’re expecting him to receive his call sometime later this month, so I’ll likely have a similar goal for Jamie this year.

• Help Jamie get his mission papers submitted (12/21): Speaking of which, Tiff and I were able to help Jamie complete submitting his mission papers. Because they went in the Sunday before Christmas, we’re not expecting a call until sometime this month. But this time around, Jamie got his wisdom teeth removed before submitting his papers.²
• Have a meal with church members, neighbors, or other friends at least 2x per month: I set this goal to force myself to be more consciously social, since I’m a bit of an introvert, and did really well. Overall I recorded at least 41 different meals with church members, neighbors, relatives, or other friends, and I’m sure there were plenty I didn’t count. Some highlights included an Altius Alumni BBQ I held in October for former colleagues, dinners with at least half a dozen families in our new ward that we didn’t previously know very well, cooking Filipino food with the Stokes, and making Colada Morada³ for the Christmas Music Night the Greys held.

• Finish Pimsleur’s Latin American Spanish Levels 4 and 5 (2/8 and 12/34⁴): I’ve already been to a Spanish speaking country in 2024, but I hadn’t yet finished the last two levels of Pimsleur Spanish. I got the first level done early in the year, but the later one took until right at the end of the year. I technically finished it a few days into the new year, but it was close enough I’m going to count it as a success. I found out that my company is going to have me represent them at a conference in Spain in February, so hopefully I’m a little more confident in my Spanish than I was when I went to Panama and Ecuador last year. That said, the version of Spanish they speak in Spain is slightly different from the Latin American version, so I may try to do some of the Castilian Spanish lessons that Pimsleur also has before that.
• Read at least 2 books per quarter: I finished reading 10 books last year: A City on Mars⁵, Saints Volume 4, and Books 1-8 of Prelude to Glory (an excellent American Revolutionary War historical fiction series)⁶. I read a few of those (Saints Vol 4, and Books 1-3 of Prelude to Glory) out loud to my family. We started the Prelude to Glory series right after someone mentioned that we were at the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. I remembered we had this historical fiction series about the Revolutionary War, so decided to try it out. We were hooked, and about 4000pgs later, I’m just about to start the final book. It was particularly fun finishing reading the story of the Battle of Princeton to my family literally on the 249th anniversary of that battle.
• Do at least 15min of medium intensity exercise (jogging, body-weight exercises, dumbells, or weights) at leas 2/3 of the days in the year: By my records I had at least 206 days of exercise I had notes for, though some weeks when we had campouts or trips, so my notes kind of fell apart, so I probably missed recording a few days. When I set the goal, I should’ve specified 2/3 of the non-Sunday days in the year, because as a rule I almost never exercise on Sundays. If you take 206 days as a percentage of the whole year including Sundays, it’s only 56%, but if you take it as a percentage of the year excluding Sundays it’s 66%. I’m going to count this one as Good though because I’m at the line by one count, and while I’m short of the goal by another count, I made a solid effort throughout the year, and came reasonably close to the goal.
• Attend the temple at least one time per month: I actually came fairly close to completing this one, with eleven temple trips over the year, though we ended up not going in December due to schedule challenges, and at least some months I missed and then did a visit early the next month. Still a work in progress, and something I want to improve on, but I think I did a lot better than most years.

…The Meh…

Ok, some goals I made serious progress on, but didn’t get very close to completing:

• Get into the habit of nightly prayers with Tiff: I did start doing better at this later in the year, but being a night owl, there were many nights where I didn’t even make it up to bed until after Tiff was asleep. I also wasn’t very reliable at doing this while traveling, etc. In December I think we started getting to over 75% of the time though, but overall I’d guess we were probably less than 25%. So some progress, but not close enough to count under “the Good”.
• Write in my journal at least 1x per week: I only managed 19 entries this year, and eight of those were either Stake Conference or General Conference notes, and one was notes from a work meeting. If you subtract that out, it was only about one entry per month on average. Not great, and definitely well short of 1x per week. That said, by having the goal, it definitely drove me to write more often. Most of my entries ended up being on plane trips for work or family. Since I can’t have my laptop out during takeoffs and landings, but I can have my journal out, it’s a convenient time to write, and many of those times, I’d write 2-3 pages. I think one thing that may help this year is the shift in when our ward meets for church. Last year, we met at noon, which encourage sleeping in in the mornings, and then our afternoons and evenings were usually pretty full with church meetings, family time, calling home, so that I almost never had time to write in my journal. This year our ward meets at 10:30am, so I think it may be easier to bake in a consistent time that usually works for a journal update.
• Setup and learn how to use the resin printer, belt fed printer, Snapmaker rotary 4th axis, and Snapmaker Dual Print head (12/8): I count this one as partially successful. I did get the dual print head working this year, in time to design and print two sets of ornaments — a temple ornament for a friend from my old ward, and a faux-stained-glass nativity ornament for Christmas. If I want to do such faux stained-glass ornaments next year, I think I can get it setup and running fairly quickly. There’s still some work if I want to print things with water soluble supports, etc. But I have the general modeling, slicing, printing, and calibration steps all sorted out. As for the Anycubic Photon Mono 4K resin printer, I did manage to get it and the cleaning station setup, including building out a printer box area with fume hood setup, and ventilation ducting routed to the outside so I wouldn’t be breathing in too many toxic fumes, but was never able to successfully make it through calibration steps. I’ve done some slicing work, and did print one predesigned/presliced model, but I definitely don’t have it ready for general use yet. For the IdeaFormer IR3V2 belt fed printer, I was able to get it partially assembled, but never finished putting it inside its tent, or setting up the roller conveyor supports, and never even tried running it. And I didn’t even bother touching the Snapmaker rotary 4th axis this year… So I definitely still have some work to go before Tiff will allow me to buy another 3d printer. Even if a Snapmaker U1’s four print heads would allow me to do a faux-stained-glass ornament using all three primary colors and the frame material… A guy can dream, can’t he?

…and the Ugly

There are a few goals that I think I did particularly poorly with this year. I figure if you don’t miss on at least some goals, you’re likely either not pushing yourself hard enough, or not picking enough goals… but that’s probably at least a little bit of “cope” on my part. Without further ado, here were the goals I didn’t make much if any progress on:

• Get back and stay below 180lb through the end of 2025: I at least tried somewhat on this. I think at my best, in late September I was getting down to just over 180lb. Then I got really sick for several weeks, then holidays, and in the end, I ended up almost exactly where I started at the end of the year last year — 187lb. Not gaining weight is a good thing, but I never locked-in consistently enough to actually make it happen. I’m still ~30lb down from where I was before I started trying to lose weight in 2020, but have regained about 15lb from my low point of 172lb… I guess middling efforts produce middling results.
• Start Pimsleur German and finish at least Level 1 and Level 2 including exercises: I didn’t even start this one. Partially because I hadn’t finished Spanish till right at the end of the year, partially because I was having second thoughts on what I should do next language-wise. At this point, I’m not sure whether I want to do Castilian Spanish first, go on to German, or join my youngest two boys in studying Japanese.
• Develop a family budget that closes and stick to it: This one is probably the most embarrassing, because it’s literally been on my weekly todo-list all year long, and we got nowhere with it. Selling Altius allowed me to pay off my debts (mostly from subsidizing Altius), and allowed us to put a downpayment on a house, and provide some savings, but we’ve slowly been burning through those savings. With us being a single-income family with four kids, this is definitely something we’ll need to work on more seriously this year.

That completes my 2025 goals accountability. Overall I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. Some of the items were ones that likely would’ve happened anyway without setting the goal (like getting Jonny out on the mission, or helping Jamie get his mission papers in), but in many cases the goals helped encourage me to try harder in several areas I cared about. I still need to think through my goals for 2026, but overall I’m pretty happy with a lot of things I achieved this past year.

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1. In true Goff fashion, he and his brothers came up with silly names for all four of his wisdom teeth that needed to be removed. Sebastian the Sideways was the one that was coming in rotated 90 degrees into the tooth in front of it… ↩︎
2. His bishop ended up being the dentist he used for the missionary dental exam, so he insisted that we take care of that before submitting. It’s almost like he knows us or something… ↩︎
3. I super yummy Ecuadorian hot spiced berry drink. Think like a mix of spiced apple cider but with a berry/pineapple base. I’m still iterating on the recipe a bit, but will definitely write it up on here once I have it dialed in further. The drink is usually used for El Día de los Muertos, but warm spiced fruit drinks kind of say “Christmas” to me. ↩︎
4. 12/34/2025 = 1/3/2026. There’s an old story about a pair of companies that were trying to close a sale in a certain calendar reason for various purposes. The paperwork took a little longer than hoped for, and the sale slipped into New Year’s. So the dated the transaction as signed December 32nd. If it works for them, it works for me. ↩︎
5. I don’t think I did a review of the book — the short version is that I like the Weinersmiths, am glad they put in the effort to write an interesting and entertaining book on space settlement, and agree with some of their points (like the importance of getting data on human health in hypogravity), but respectfully disagree with some of their worldview and conclusions. ↩︎
6. Technically I finished book 8 on “12/37” or 1/6/2026, but I finished most of it before the end of the year. ↩︎