Post-Mortem 2025: Why Your Goals Will Fail

It's December 21st.

10 days left until the calendar changes version.

I can already see it coming. Soon the avalanche of fateful posts on LinkedIn and Instagram will begin: "New Year, New Me", "This is my year", "Blank page".

Please, don't be one more of the crowd.

Don't fall into the trap of the 99% who write a wish list on a napkin or in their phone notes:

"I'm going to lose 10 pounds." "I'm going to read 12 books." "I'm going to be more patient with the kids."

As a Tech Lead, I have to tell it to you raw: That's not a plan — it's a hallucination. It's a simple wish that dies before it compiles.

The data doesn't lie: According to Strava, "Quitter's Day" (the day most people abandon their resolutions) is the second Friday of January. That "motivation" lasts less than a poorly planned sprint.

If in your work a production server crashes, we don't light a candle wishing "next year it won't crash." We don't trust luck.

We do a Post-Mortem.

We read the logs. We find the Root Cause. We write the patch. We deploy the fix.

If you want 2026 to be different, stop dreaming and start debugging your 2025.

The "Goals" Bug (Scott Adams)

In his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams destroys the idea of goals with an engineer's logic:

"Losers have goals. Winners have systems."

The structural problem with a goal (e.g., "Run a marathon") is that you live in a state of constant failure until the moment you achieve it. And if you get injured the day before, all the effort feels like a system crash. It's fragile.

A System (e.g., "Run 30 minutes every day at 6 AM") changes the reward. Every time you go out, the code ran well. You won. The system gives you daily dopamine. The marathon stops being the objective and becomes an inevitable side effect.

Antifragility: Using the Chaos (Nassim Taleb)

This is where most professional parents fail. We look for "stability," but life with kids and corporate work is pure chaos.

Nassim Taleb explains in Antifragile that your 2025 review isn't to punish yourself. It's to extract data.

Every mistake of this year, every day you didn't follow through, every argument you lost — is Data. If you ignore that data, 2026 will have the same bugs as 2025.

Your Sunday Task: The RCA (Root Cause Analysis)

So you don't stay in theory, I designed a tool. It's the same one I use.

It's not a colorful wish list. It's a cold spreadsheet based on the "5 Whys" technique we use in the industry to find the origin of a failure.

How the tool works:

1. Look at each of your 4 vital domains (Health, Family, Career, Mind).
2. For each failed goal, ask "Why?" five times until you find the real root cause.
3. Write the patch — a concrete system, not a new wish.

Download it here*: The Annual Debugging (v1.0) Above Average

*Google will ask you to create your own private copy. Your data is not shared with anyone.

Do the dirty work today.

Look at your year's logs in the face. Your future self will thank me.

It's the only way for the 2026 version of yourself to be an upgrade — not just a restart.

Pablo Marichal | Tech Lead | Above Average