163 Personal Goals Examples: Find a Goal to Aim At

Personal goals are the best way to make your life more fun and more meaningful, but coming up with the right goal can be challenging. If you want to achieve something great this year or start working towards a big goal but you’re not sure what, you’re in the right place. This list of 163 personal goal examples has something for you.

Let’s get straight into the goals!

Travel Goals

To travel more is a common personal goal. A desire to travel exists within all of us, we are creatures that just want to explore. It makes sense then that some of the most common personal goals are travel goals. There are so many travel goals including simply visiting the best destinations. Start with a map if you feel stuck after looking at the goals below.

1. Trek to Everest Base Camp
2. Walk the wall of China
3. Visit Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini
4. See the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem
5. Explore Angkor Watt
6. Explore Machu Picchu
7. See the Great Pyramid
8. See the Northern Lights
9. Discover the culture of Bali
10. Scale Killermanjaro in Tanzania
11. See the Grand Canyon
12. Visit Stone Henge
13. Visit Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam
14. Visit Cambridge University
15. Find Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross London
16. Hold up The Leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Play Golf in Las Vegas
18. Visit the Colosseum in Rome
19. Explore the Parthenon in Athens
20. See the Old Man of Hoy in the Scottish Highlands
21. Step foot on every continent
22. Drink coffee with a view of the Eiffel Tower
23. Smoke a Cuban cigar in Havana
24. Taste Sushi in Tokyo
25. Flee from bulls in Pamplona
26. Experience Holi in Jaipur
27. See the Dali Lama in Dharamshala
28. Awe at Cliffside temples in Bhutan
29. Spend three days in London
30. Drink a beer (or two) at Oktoberfest in Munich
31. Explore the markets of Marakesh
32. Look down on the world in the Burge Kalifa in Dubai
33. Explore the ancient Laotian royal capital of Luang Prabang
34. Get a tattoo in Hong Kong
35. Look down on Cape Town from Table Mountain
36. Survive in the Amazon Rainforest
37. Visit the Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar in Nepal
38. Learn kung fu at The Shaolin Temple
39. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
40. Visit the 9/11 Memorial
41. Visit Buckingham Palace
42. Drink a Guinness in Dublin
43. Tour the Wine growing region in France
44. Eat Pizza in Napoli
45. Visit the birthplace of Humanity – Ethiopia
46. Visit Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica
47. Visit Hemingway’s house in Cuba
48. Learn Karate in Okinawa
49. Visit every country on the planet
50. See Kangaroos in Australia
51. Go on a cruise
52. Camp under the stars

Personal Finance Goals

Figuring out a way to make money that we can enjoy and earn enough to be comfortable is a lifelong journey for most of us. Becoming debt free and investing are common financial goals but there are so many more money goals.

53. Be debt free
54. Pay off your mortgage
55. Buy a second home
56. Buy a holiday home
57. Flip a home for profit
58. FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)
59. Have a $1,000 cash emergency fund
60. Invest in the stock market
61. Own a Berkshire Hathaway share
62. Own a bar of gold
63. Start a side hustle or side gig
64. Invest in bitcoin
65. Track your spending for a month
66. Earn passive income
67. Have enough savings to retire
68. Read 10 personal finance books
69. Max out your 401(K)
70. Live on a dollar a day for a year
71. Give 10% of your salary to charity
72. Save half of what you earn
73. Open a savings account for your child’s college tuition
74. Achieve multiple income streams
75. Get a raise

Academic Goals

When we’re at school, most of us can’t wait to leave but when you’re older you wish you could go back. It’s not too late though! You can still learn all the things you wish you’d learned at school, and more.

76. Read Homer’s Illiad and Odessey
77. Read Virgil’s Aeneid
78. Read The Complete Shakespeare
79. Read Beowolf
80. Read the Greek philosophers
81. Read the whole Bible
82. Graduate college
83. Get a master’s degree
84. Get a doctorate
85. Read a book a week
86. Learn to read Latin
87. Learn to read ancient Greek
88. Learn a foreign language
89. Learn Jungian psychology
90. Read Freud
91. Relearn high school math
92. Learn a scripting language (bash, python, p)
93. Learn a web language (HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript)
94. Learn a programming language (C++, Java, .net)
95. Write a novel
96. Write a memoir
97. Publish a poem
98. Understand Einstein’s theories

Fitness Goals

Fitness goals are the best way to keep yourself progressing in the gym and stay healthy. You don’t need to make massive goals here, a simple goal of going to the gym once a week is a great goal! After a year, you will have built the confidence to try something more challenging.

99. Lift a two-plate bench press (225lbs, 100kg)
100. Squat three plates (315lbs, 140kg)
101. Set up a home gym
102. Join a gym
103. Buy a sauna
104. Run a marathon
105. Become a black belt in BJJ
106. Compete in a boxing/MMA match
107. Do the front splits
108. Do the side splits
109. Run a five-minute mile
110. Do yoga every day for a year
111. 1m Box jump
112. Complete an Iron Man
113. Start the ketogenic diet
114. Cycle 100 miles
115. Get a six-pack
116. Compete in a bodybuilding competition
117. Gain 10lbs of muscle in a year
118. Lose 20lbs of fat in a year
119. Start a running habit
120. start a yoga practice

Social Life Goals

Family, friends, and the communities will live in are all important, so it’s natural that we have goals to make this area of our lives better. While you can’t necessarily ‘improve’ your family or friends, you can improve your relationships with them.

121. Get Married
122. Have Children
123. Meet new people
124. Teach your child to read
125. Become a better listener
126. Wear matching outfits with your partner
127. Build a treehouse for your children
128. Take your parents away on vacation
129. Go into business with a friend
130. Spend more time with your family
131. Create a Sunday dinner tradition at your house for your extended family/friends
132. Choose your children over work
133. Make a new friend
134. Homeschool your children
135. Remove the toxic people from your life
136. Start a weekly tradition with your friends
137. Reconnect with an old friend
138. Arrange a reunion for your school friends

Personal Development Goals

Personal development or personal growth goals are goals that will help you grow as a person. They might not be obvious from the outside but after accomplishing a few of your personal development goals, the people closest to you will start to notice a change.

139. Start a meditation practice
140. Get therapy
141. Pray everyday
142. Read scripture
143. Take a personality test
144. Learn to use GTD
145. Understand what makes you angry
146. Come to grips with past trauma
147. Apologize to someone you wronged
148. Volunteer or do charity work
149. Find work-life balance
150. Make someone feel loved
151. Quit social media for a month
152. Help someone in need
153. Discover your life’s purpose
154. Overcome your fear
155. Practice patience
156. Wake up earlier
157. Let go of beliefs that don’t serve you
158. Let go of a long held grudge
159. Declutter your room or home
160. Become a minimalist
161. Make your bed every morning
162. Create a morning routine
163. Write a gratitude journal

The Best Tips to Set Your Personal Goals

Set SMART Goals

A SMART goal is one that is:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable
• Realistic
• Timely

A SMART Goal Example

To turn an idea into a SMART goal, go through these steps. Let’s use the idea of:

“I want to lose weight.”

1. Make it Specific – I want to lose belly fat
2. Make it Measurable – I want to lose 40lbs of belly fat
3. Make it Actionable – I want to go on the ketogenic diet until I’ve lost 40lbs of belly fat
4. Make it Realistic – I want to go on the ketogenic diet until I’ve lost 20lbs of belly fat
5. Make it Timely – I want to go on the ketogenic diet until I’ve lost 20lbs of belly fat, starting today

Of course, you don’t need to use the SMART system for every goal you set, instead use it as a framework to improve your goals. When you set a new goal go through the five steps and ask yourself would this goal be better if it was more specific, measurable, etc?

Of the five steps, the most effective by far is Actionable, it’s so easy to set a goal like travel more or read the classics or start a business, but a goal like this isn’t very easy to put into action. It’s hard to see what doing those goals actually looks like and so, when you try to work on them you may well fall at the first hurdle.

Changing those goals to actionable goals like visiting Rome, reading Paradise Lost, or starting a blog about cats makes it much more likely that you’ll achieve them.

Long and Short Term Personal Goals

You need a good mix of long and short-term goals to keep you motivated and making progress. Don’t make too many goals that require ten or more years to achieve. While it’s great to have an endpoint in mind, goals that seem too far off lack the motivating energy to work hard at them today.

Instead, use goal milestones that you want to hit on the way to your long-term goal. If your goal is to retire in ten years, that’s great but will that keep you working hard every day for the next ten years? Perhaps an intermediate goal such as setting up a passive income stream this year or saving $25k this year would add some urgency and energy and still keep you on track for your long-term vision.

How Many Goals Should I Have?

I think you should have at least one goal for each area of your life, if you don’t then either you are completely satisfied in that area or you’ve lost all hope that that area of your life will ever improve.

Warren Buffet supposedly recommends having only 5 goals to work on at any one time, which I think is good advice if you want to make massive progress on your goals. Too many goals will spread you too thin, and too few will make you one-dimensional.

Remember you don’t need to be actively working on all your goals. You may have a goal to learn to juggle or speak Spanish, but that doesn’t mean you should be working on it now. Keeping a someday maybe list with goals for the future can be freeing and let you record all the things you want to do without the burden of feeling that you need to be doing them all. Make a bucket list, with personal goals you want to check off before you die if that’s more your style.

So go through the different areas of your life, or the topics above, and pick some goals that you want to achieve. Then when you’re done, decide on which goals to work on this year.