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.
- Trek to Everest Base Camp
- Walk the wall of China
- Visit Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini
- See the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem
- Explore Angkor Watt
- Explore Machu Picchu
- See the Great Pyramid
- See the Northern Lights
- Discover the culture of Bali
- Scale Killermanjaro in Tanzania
- See the Grand Canyon
- Visit Stone Henge
- Visit Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam
- Visit Cambridge University
- Find Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross London
- Hold up The Leaning Tower of Pisa
- Play Golf in Las Vegas
- Visit the Colosseum in Rome
- Explore the Parthenon in Athens
- See the Old Man of Hoy in the Scottish Highlands
- Step foot on every continent
- Drink coffee with a view of the Eiffel Tower
- Smoke a Cuban cigar in Havana
- Taste Sushi in Tokyo
- Flee from bulls in Pamplona
- Experience Holi in Jaipur
- See the Dali Lama in Dharamshala
- Awe at Cliffside temples in Bhutan
- Spend three days in London
- Drink a beer (or two) at Oktoberfest in Munich
- Explore the markets of Marakesh
- Look down on the world in the Burge Kalifa in Dubai
- Explore the ancient Laotian royal capital of Luang Prabang
- Get a tattoo in Hong Kong
- Look down on Cape Town from Table Mountain
- Survive in the Amazon Rainforest
- Visit the Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar in Nepal
- Learn kung fu at The Shaolin Temple
- Cross the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco
- Visit the 9/11 Memorial
- Visit Buckingham Palace
- Drink a Guinness in Dublin
- Tour the Wine growing region in France
- Eat Pizza in Napoli
- Visit the birthplace of Humanity – Ethiopia
- Visit Bob Marley’s house in Jamaica
- Visit Hemingway’s house in Cuba
- Learn Karate in Okinawa
- Visit every country on the planet
- See Kangaroos in Australia
- Go on a cruise
- 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.
- Be debt free
- Pay off your mortgage
- Buy a second home
- Buy a holiday home
- Flip a home for profit
- FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early)
- Have a $1,000 cash emergency fund
- Invest in the stock market
- Own a Berkshire Hathaway share
- Own a bar of gold
- Start a side hustle or side gig
- Invest in bitcoin
- Track your spending for a month
- Earn passive income
- Have enough savings to retire
- Read 10 personal finance books
- Max out your 401(K)
- Live on a dollar a day for a year
- Give 10% of your salary to charity
- Save half of what you earn
- Open a savings account for your child’s college tuition
- Achieve multiple income streams
- 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.
- Read Homer’s Illiad and Odessey
- Read Virgil’s Aeneid
- Read The Complete Shakespeare
- Read Beowolf
- Read the Greek philosophers
- Read the whole Bible
- Graduate college
- Get a master’s degree
- Get a doctorate
- Read a book a week
- Learn to read Latin
- Learn to read ancient Greek
- Learn a foreign language
- Learn Jungian psychology
- Read Freud
- Relearn high school math
- Learn a scripting language (bash, python, p)
- Learn a web language (HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript)
- Learn a programming language (C++, Java, .net)
- Write a novel
- Write a memoir
- Publish a poem
- 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.
- Lift a two-plate bench press (225lbs, 100kg)
- Squat three plates (315lbs, 140kg)
- Set up a home gym
- Join a gym
- Buy a sauna
- Run a marathon
- Become a black belt in BJJ
- Compete in a boxing/MMA match
- Do the front splits
- Do the side splits
- Run a five-minute mile
- Do yoga every day for a year
- 1m Box jump
- Complete an Iron Man
- Start the ketogenic diet
- Cycle 100 miles
- Get a six-pack
- Compete in a bodybuilding competition
- Gain 10lbs of muscle in a year
- Lose 20lbs of fat in a year
- Start a running habit
- 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.
- Get Married
- Have Children
- Meet new people
- Teach your child to read
- Become a better listener
- Wear matching outfits with your partner
- Build a treehouse for your children
- Take your parents away on vacation
- Go into business with a friend
- Spend more time with your family
- Create a Sunday dinner tradition at your house for your extended family/friends
- Choose your children over work
- Make a new friend
- Homeschool your children
- Remove the toxic people from your life
- Start a weekly tradition with your friends
- Reconnect with an old friend
- 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.
- Start a meditation practice
- Get therapy
- Pray everyday
- Read scripture
- Take a personality test
- Learn to use GTD
- Understand what makes you angry
- Come to grips with past trauma
- Apologize to someone you wronged
- Volunteer or do charity work
- Find work-life balance
- Make someone feel loved
- Quit social media for a month
- Help someone in need
- Discover your life’s purpose
- Overcome your fear
- Practice patience
- Wake up earlier
- Let go of beliefs that don’t serve you
- Let go of a long held grudge
- Declutter your room or home
- Become a minimalist
- Make your bed every morning
- Create a morning routine
- 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.”
- Make it Specific – I want to lose belly fat
- Make it Measurable – I want to lose 40lbs of belly fat
- Make it Actionable – I want to go on the ketogenic diet until I’ve lost 40lbs of belly fat
- Make it Realistic – I want to go on the ketogenic diet until I’ve lost 20lbs of belly fat
- 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.
Originally from the U.K, Greg has lived in Asia for over 15 years. Fluent in a handful of languages, he ran a management consultancy before creating Face Dragons. He spends his time now traveling around Asia, writing, taking photos, and drinking coffee.
