Tips On Achieving Your Chess Goals In 2025!

Hi everyone and Happy New Year! 2025 is underway, and as a group, we have been setting some exciting goals for 2025! I wish you all the best of success, and I'm eager to see what we can achieve.

I've been setting my own goals annually since 2012, and I took the opportunity to reflect on what I think works well and outline some tips in an article on site. I encourage you to read the article if you are interested - it has a lot of my learnings and thoughts from past years, but I've also pasted a very abbreviated list of my tips here. I hope they are useful to you. Good luck in 2025!

10 Tips To Succeed With Your New Year's Chess Goals!

1. Don't set resolutions. Set goals.
   • Resolutions are commitments to some change. Goals are results or achievements you work toward.
2. Set goals that mean something to you.
3. Set a lot of goals.
   • Don't go overboard, but progress usually isn't limited to one goal. I encourage setting multiple goals rather than one all-defining one. Progress happens in many ways.
4. Be realistic.
   • IMO, it's better to surpass a goal rather than to fall far short. Goals should generally be in line with progress achieved in past years.
5. Register now!
   • Now is a great time to register for tournaments, purchase your intended study material, contact a coach, or otherwise make commitments for the year.
6. The first 30 days are critical! Build habits and streaks!
7. There's nothing wrong with not achieving goals.
   • Priorities change. Life changes. Don't be disappointed by missing a goal. Many times I've missed a goal multiple years in a row before achieving it in a later year.
8. Celebrate unexpected achievements!
   • Perhaps you have a rating goal for 2025, and at the end of the year you fall short, but along the way, you win your first OTB tournament or beat your first titled player. There are lots of achievement that happen throughout the year that complement the goals we set now, and I encourage you to celebrate all of those wins
9. Remember the bigger picture.
   • The larger goal should always be to evolve and grow as a person—being the happiest, healthiest, and most impactful person you can be! Don't let success or failure in one specific goal for the year define you.
10. My goals.
    • At the end, I shared a list of all my past goals and what I did and didn't achieve. I've learned a lot, and I wish you the positive experiences with your goals that I've had with mine. 💚