2025: A Year of Missed Goals—And Unexpected Wins

At the start of the year, I set a few clear goals. One was personal: losing a significant amount of weight. Others were professional: specifically earning the CISM and CISA certifications. By the end of the year, the results didn’t line up neatly with that plan.

I didn’t hit my weight-loss target. I lost some weight (about ten pounds) but nowhere near what I’d set out to do. At the same time, this year was anything but a failure. I did earn both the CISM and CISA certification. I also earned the CISSP, CMMC-RP, and wrote and published a book. None of those outcomes were accidental, even if they weren’t planned back in January.

They were the result of sustained effort, compounding work, and systems that, while imperfect, held up under pressure. That contrast is what made the year instructive.

One of the clearest lessons was that progress is rarely siloed. The effort I put into CISM and CISA didn’t just prepare me for those exams; it built mental endurance, pattern recognition, and confidence. That momentum carried me directly into CISSP preparation and into the discipline required to write a book. Each milestone made the next one more achievable. Professional goals often compound this way. Focused work creates leverage.

Weight loss, however, operates under a very different set of rules.

I built a weight-loss plan that would have worked well for a much younger version of myself. It was optimistic, rigid, and insufficiently forgiving. When progress stalled (as it inevitably does) I didn’t have systems designed to absorb mistakes, recalibrate, and continue forward. I had rules, not safeguards.

Losing some weight was still a win, but weight loss isn’t a decision you make once. It’s a decision you make repeatedly, often hundreds of times a day. “Don’t eat sweets” isn’t a single choice if you walk past a break room stocked with your favorite snack multiple times. Working from home doesn’t simplify this; it can compound it. If there’s fresh-baked bread in the kitchen in the morning, you may have to decide a dozen separate times not to eat it before lunch.

That makes weight loss fundamentally different from many professional projects. Studying for an exam or writing a book compounds in long, focused blocks of effort. Weight loss demands constant reinforcement under changing conditions. It requires systems that assume failure will occur and designs that make recovery automatic rather than discouraging.

The real lesson wasn’t that the goal itself was wrong; it was that the system supporting it was incomplete. In my professional work, I know better than to design controls that rely on perfect human behavior. Yet that’s exactly what I did with my health goal. I underestimated how much friction, fatigue, and repetition mattered, and I overestimated how long willpower alone could carry the load. That disconnect is something I’m taking seriously going forward.

Looking ahead, next year isn’t about trying harder or setting louder goals. It’s about designing better systems—building safeguards instead of rigid rules, planning explicitly for stalls and mistakes rather than pretending they won’t happen, and applying the same systems thinking to personal goals that I already apply professionally.

I didn’t become the person I expected to become this year. But I did become more capable, more reflective, and better equipped to design systems that actually work under real-world conditions. That’s a foundation worth building on.