How to NOT Fail in February

Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast! I'm Jared Moon, and in this episode, we're taking a break from our programming series to tackle a common challenge: setting and sticking to your goals. As we dive into the new year, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of ambition. But without the right approach, that excitement can quickly lead to burnout and failure.

Let’s talk about the two biggest mistakes people make when setting goals—and how to avoid them.

Mistake #1: Doing Too Many Things

We all want to excel in multiple areas of life: fitness, relationships, career, personal growth, and more. But spreading yourself too thin across too many goals can lead to overwhelm and, ultimately, failure.

Why This Happens:

• Lack of focus makes it difficult to excel in any one area.
• Taking on too many new habits at once can lead to burnout.
• Perfectionism creeps in—if you can’t do everything perfectly, you quit altogether.

How to Fix It:

Simplify and prioritize. Choose one habit or goal in each area of your life and focus on that. For example, in fitness, start with a single change like committing to three workouts per week. Once you’ve mastered that, layer in another habit, such as improving your diet or adding recovery strategies like sauna sessions or cold plunges.

By tackling one thing at a time, you build momentum and ensure long-term sustainability.

Mistake #2: Setting Goals That Are Too Big

Big dreams are great, but unrealistic timelines and enormous goals can set you up for failure. For instance, aiming to complete a 100-mile ultra-marathon in six months when you’ve never run consistently is a recipe for frustration.

Why This Happens:

• Social media glorifies extreme challenges, creating pressure to aim unrealistically high.
• Lack of experience with the goal leads to misjudging its difficulty.
• The absence of smaller milestones makes the goal feel insurmountable.

How to Fix It:

Go smaller to go bigger.

• Break your big goal into smaller, achievable milestones.
• For example, if your ultimate goal is a 100-mile race, start with a 5K. Once you’ve mastered that, progress to a 10K, then a half marathon, and so on.
• Celebrate your progress at each milestone, building confidence and experience as you go.

This approach applies to all areas of life. Whether you’re aiming to build a successful business, improve your fitness, or strengthen relationships, start small and scale up.

The Key to Success: Balance and Realistic Timelines

It’s not about shrinking your ambitions—it’s about making them achievable. The timeline for achieving a big goal is just as important as the goal itself. Be patient, stay consistent, and set yourself up for success by focusing on what’s realistic.

Quick Tips for Success:

1. Pick one thing to focus on in each area of your life.
2. Start with small, manageable steps.
3. Celebrate milestones along the way to your ultimate goal.
4. Reassess and adjust your plan as needed.

Final Thoughts

You can achieve incredible things, but it’s essential to approach your goals with intention and strategy. Whether you’re tackling fitness, relationships, or career milestones, focus on one step at a time and embrace the journey.

If you need help creating a well-rounded fitness plan, check out Garage Gym Athlete and sign up for a free trial. We’ve got your back with programming designed to help you crush your goals—one step at a time.

Remember: If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: 

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Jared Moon here and we're taking a quick break in the series. So hopefully you've been enjoying the series where I'm talking about programming, really getting into the weeds of just exactly how we program. So we you know, we made it five episodes deep into a 13 part series, but I didn't want to leave you hanging if you weren't enjoying nerding out on programming.

Programming with me, then, you know, I want to interject some other content in here before we get back onto it continuing into the endurance continuum. And we will pick up part six in the next podcast episode. But there's the reality of life that I want to talk about today. And it's how you can really fail going into February.

It's how you can fail for the rest of the year. You know, I think it's whatever the first the first week in January is a January 7th or two weeks into January. Something is it's quitter's day. I'd never heard that before until this year, believe it or not. I know a lot of people are very familiar with it, but it's like, Most people start, you know, really ambitious.

They have these big goals in January and then they quit, they, they don't do it. And I've talked a lot about these kinds of things over the years. You know, a lot of it is perfectionism people, you know, when they're not perfect when, when they didn't do something seven days in a row, whatever it is, they, they quit because they're not perfect.

And I always remind people that that's not how life really works anywhere else. If you were. Sick for a day of work or you know, you weren't the best husband or father or spouse or whatever today, it doesn't mean that you get to quit. It doesn't mean that it's over because you gotta, you gotta stick with those things.

You gotta keep pushing forward and just doing what little you can. So if you want to continue to fail, there are two very easy ways to do that. And that's what I'm gonna be talking about today. So the first one is you do too many different things. You're just doing too many different things. I get it. We all want to do a lot of things with our lives.

We want to travel. We want to make more money. We want to be fit. We want to be the best we can in our relationships. But the reality is we can't be the best at everything all the time. You can balance a lot of these things, but to truly go after something, it's going to require focus. And so you're doing too many things and across the spectrum, you know, you can balance being a good father, a good husband, a good business owner you know, being fit that that's a lot of like who I am and what I've done over the years.

Is doing my best to balance all of those things. But then when you go into any one of those categories, that is where we go to doing too many things. So I'm not saying if you're like me and you, you know, I have three kids, I have more than one business. You know, I've been married for coming up on 15 years you know, I'm just doing a lot of different things and, and all of those things are important to me and I'll always prioritize my time in those respective areas.

So when I say doing, when you're doing too many things, I'm not saying, oh, well maybe you should quit being a father or maybe you quit being a business owner. Obviously that's not what I'm saying. It's too many things when you zoom into one of those areas. So if we take fitness and health, like just as a category, for example.

You know, you might try to pick up too many different habits within that category. You might be like, okay, well I'm going to you know, change my diet on top of changing my diet, I'm going to start training six days a week instead of three. I'm gonna start fasting. I'm going to start doing the sauna.

red light therapy cold plunge. And if you're not doing any of those things, you're, you're adding too many things in this one category. And we can do this really in any category. You could go to your marriage, for example, while I'm not going to say that there's ever such thing as focusing too much on your marriage.

Like if you're not, if you don't have good habits built up in your relationships and you're like, well, You know, we do one date night a month. And so now instead of that, we're going to do a date night every single week. We're going to take a trip together every single month. And then, you know, twice a year, we're going to, you know, take a longer two week trip together.

Like just say you add all of these new things that you want that you think will improve your relationship. And no doubt they probably would, but none of those things. You're currently doing. And so to add them all would amount to failure because you're not going to be able to actually do it. And again, going back to that perfectionism mentality, instead of doing one tiny thing that you could do to improve your marriage, your relationships are doing one tiny thing that you could do to improve your fitness or your health.

You try to do too many things. And then you don't do any of them or you don't stick to them. And then you think that you're a failure. So you don't stick to any, you just quit the whole thing. So doing too many is the first biggest mistake that I see. The other thing that I see is not too many different things.

It's the magnitude of the thing that they want to achieve. And so now we're going down to maybe one thing, but it's just too big. It's too it's too large. It's not something that you can actually handle. You know, and I see this a lot specifically in the fitness world. I'll try to try to get outside the marriage examples and, and business examples here, but I see this.

In in fitness where the magnitude it might be one goal, but the magnitude is too large. So we're talking Okay, I want to do a million push ups this year I want to run a marathon this year when you know You've never run a day in your life where you want to do a hundred mile ultra marathon Which is more like what i'm hearing today These days, it's like, I'm going to do a hundred mile ultra marathon.

And, you know I'm going to do it in July or something, you know, you have like six months to train for this thing and you haven't ran more than three miles in a week in the last two years, it's the magnitude. And now I'm not going to say, don't chase your goals. Don't go big, but if you set something that's massive and you don't actually have a very good plan for it, when it comes time to doing the thing, you're not going to do it.

And then you're going to be on the same cycle as the too many things, but now it's just, they're too large. The things that you want to do are too big. And so you're not really achieving anything. You're not like getting those small wins. So just an example to hit that home further is like, if I just never ran, let's just say I was, I'd never really run a day in my life and I want to do a hundred mile ultra marathon three months.

And I'm not trained for it. It comes up and I don't do it. Well, the, the reason I'm, you know, chasing a hundred mile marathon or, or maybe someone else is chasing it is just because they think it sounds cool. They think they want to do it. Like that's the, the bar that's been set through social media and everything else.

But you know, what'd be really cool too. If you're not really a runner, a 5k. 5k would be awesome. Try and just train for the 5k and do really well in that. And then your next race can be three months later and it can be a 10 K. It can be a 15 K. It could be a 50 K it could be whatever margin you want to increase it from there, but it's okay in your goals to start small.

And I know that this goes against the grain with like setting big goals. I think you can set the biggest goals you want in your life, but if you have the wrong timelines for those goals. You're not going to achieve anything. So if you want to, you know, go to the, going to the business example, if you're like, I want to create a hundred million dollar business.

It's like, cool. How much time do you give yourself to do that? Well, if you said 10, 20, 30 years, cool. That maybe it's possible. Like maybe that's what it's going to take. Maybe it's going to take two decades of work and you'll actually achieve. But if you're like, I want to create a hundred million dollar business this year.

It's like, Oh, what's your business doing now? It's like nothing. It's like, Oh, okay. That's not going to happen. Right? So there's nothing wrong with having that goal. Like I would never tell someone you cannot achieve that. I would never say that you can't run a hundred mile ultra marathon. I would never tell someone that they can't create start a hundred million dollar business.

I would never say that to someone, but I would tell you that your timelines might be wrong. Like the magnitude of what you want is awesome, but the magnet, but the timeline of the, of how big it is, is, is absolutely incorrect. And so these are the two biggest mistakes that I see when people are setting goals and we're going into, you know, 2025 and a big reason I want to put this podcast you know, kind of into the feed where it did is because this is about where the lull happens.

I know people were talking about that. You know, quitters, whatever, quitters day earlier in January. I feel like most people make it a little bit longer than that. I think that they make it, you know, closer to the end of January, beginning of February, and then the quitting really starts happening. They started abandoning, abandoning all the excitement and goals that they had.

So with the two, two biggest mistakes people make, you know, doing too many things or the things that are too big, the magnitude is too great. The simple, the solution is simple. So do fewer things. Like if you want to pick up those 15 new habits and fitness, you want to do the cold plunge, the sauna, the red light therapy, you want to work out six times per week, intermittent fasting.

You want to take a new multivitamin and new supplements. And like, you just, you do, you want to do all those things. I get it. I get it. But if you're not doing any of those things right now, just pick one, just pick one, and you can do this across every area of your life. Just pick one thing. Even if it seems like it's a little bit easy, you know, of that entire list I gave, it's like, you know what?

I think intermittent fasting would have the biggest you know, bang for my buck. It'd be worth the most time, you know, worth my time, I'm going to do that. And then after you feel like you've got a handle on that, it could take two weeks, two months. It doesn't matter once you got a handle on that, but you know what?

I'm feeling pretty good about that. I think I'm gonna start trying to add the sauna into my schedule. It's just once by the time, as opposed to adding them all at once, adding them all at once as a recipe for failure, adding one at a time, you know, once you kind of have it locked in and then doing the next one, that's how you want to execute those things.

Now, the next on the magnitude, like I said, I get it. You got big goals. I've got big goals, set milestones along the way. Okay. It's okay to have the big goal, but set milestones of like, okay, I do want to run that a hundred mile ultra marathon, but you know what? I've never done that. I don't really know what it would take.

So I am going to say I'm going to run a 5k race. You know, in the next six weeks, do that, see how it feels, just get used to a race, like what it's like to show up for one, sign up for one, you know, starting to learn basic fueling strategies, hydration strategies, and then the next race can be twice as long, three times as long.

And then you can start to forecast better in all honesty, because I'm not saying like, Oh, do the a hundred mile ultra marathon in two years. I'm saying. Sign up for the races. It could be one month at a time. They can be six weeks apart. They could be six months apart, but you'll start to better realize, engage the, the reality of what you're wanting to do.

So going smaller to go bigger. So you're going smaller to go bigger. You're, you're setting these milestone goals that are just like little check ins that are going to help you get better along the way. And then eventually you will get to that ultimate goal. Like you want to run that a hundred mile ultra marathon.

But now you're going to be seasoned. Like I've done eight races before this. I know what races are like. I know what I need to wear. I know what I need to, you know, eat and how to fuel myself. And like, I understand what it's like to actually fit this kind of training in with family life. You get to answer so many questions when you set smile, these, these milestones.

So you go smaller. To go bigger. And that's it. That's all I wanted to hop on here and say is like, I am in your corner. Like I want you to achieve all your things, you know, all your goals, all the things that you say you want to do. But sometimes we get caught up in the excitement of the new year. All the new things that we could do, we're doing too many things.

The things that we want to do are too big and we're setting the wrong timelines. You can do all of it. You absolutely can, and I'm here for it. I want to do a lot too, but we've got to make sure that we're setting ourselves up for success and not failure. Remember if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.