Why 98% of People Fail Their New Year Goals (Anthony Explains)

This episode of The Anthony Amen Show breaks down why most people fail before the New Year even begins — and how to fix it for good.

Anthony explains why traditional New Year’s resolutions don’t work, and why motivation-based goal setting almost always leads to burnout, frustration, and quitting. Instead of vague promises like “lose weight” or “make more money,” he walks through a practical, numbers-based framework that turns big goals into realistic, achievable actions.

The conversation dives into SMART goals, prioritization, and why breaking goals down by month, week, and even hour removes overwhelm and decision paralysis. Using real-world business and fitness examples, Anthony shows how massive goals — like building a million-dollar business — become attainable when you focus on systems, vehicles, and consistent execution instead of hype.

This episode also challenges how people approach New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, explaining why starting exhausted, hungover, and unfocused sets you up for failure — and how changing that single habit can shift the entire year ahead.

This episode is for:
• Anyone tired of failing New Year’s resolutions
• Entrepreneurs who want clarity instead of chaos
• Fitness professionals and business owners who want real growth
• People who want structure, not motivation

If you want to start the year with clarity, discipline, and a plan that actually compounds, this episode will change how you approach the next 12 months.

Subscribe to The Anthony Amen Show for grounded conversations on fitness, business, leadership, and life.

Share this episode with someone serious about making this year different.

Chapters

• 0:00 Rethinking New Year’s Day
• 1:44 Why Resolutions Fail
• 3:16 Making SMART Goals That Stick
• 6:20 Demystifying The Million-Dollar Target
• 9:54 Breaking Revenue Into Daily And Hourly
• 13:10 Vehicles For Hitting The Number
• 16:25 Paid Ads, CAC, And Credit Lines
• 20:10 Referrals And Organic Prospecting
• 24:05 Compounding Clients And Retention Math

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

What's up, guys, and welcome to another episode of the Anthony Haman Show. I am standing, I am moving, I am grooving. This is how I do business. So this is how I wanted to do this episode standing up. And we're gonna talk about how 98% of you screw up New Year's. So before you go out and decide to drink a little too much, wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning, I'm gonna talk about what I do for New Year's and have done for the last four years that's completely changed my life. So first, let's lay some ground rules. So many people set New Year's resolutions. They want to do better, they wanna be better. But there's a couple of things they do wrong inside of that. The first standpoint is they don't set a goal. They set an arbitrary goal, meaning, I want to look better. What does that mean? Well, I want to lose weight. How much weight? In what time frame do you want to lose weight? And we start setting what we call SMART goals. The other side of it is you're already set up for failure. What? What do you mean I'm set up for failure? Let's chat. New Year's Eve, you're thinking about planning your life and doing better. You're hanging out, you're cheers in, you're drinking with your friends, you wake up the next morning. How do you feel New Year's Day? Groggy, set back, unmotivated, in bed. Now you're gonna tell me that you're so motivated to work on your goals that you're gonna be able to do them good and be able to achieve yourself? Hell no. So wouldn't it make more sense if you really and truly want to prioritize and change your life? New Year's Day should be about setting things right and doing things well. We always talk about how you don't want to put off your start date. You don't want to wait till next week, you don't wait till the weekends. The longer you set that time frame, the more impossible it becomes because things are gonna prioritize and get in the way over it. So let's super narrow focus. Let's change what New Year's is about. New Year's Eve, I want you going to bed before midnight, and I want you waking up refreshed with a nice hot cup of coffee, black, right? Because it's healthier that way. And be able to change your life for the better and actually be better than you were the previous year. So we're gonna bring this to what I do, and we're gonna use some examples personally. First thing we need to figure out is what is our prioritization? What do we want to be better in following year? There's a couple of things, right? Let's say we want to lose weight. Or let's say we want to make more money. Mula. Spelling's tough today. So these are the two most common years goals, and let's break them down a little. We talked about smarkles. What is a smarkle? You hear this term thrown around and people truly don't understand it. So we're gonna define it. So the first one is S. S stands for specific. This is not specific. What does make more money and lose weight mean? I don't know. So let's specify it. Lose weight. I want to lose 12 pounds. Make more money. I want to make a hundred thousand dollars. Great. Now we're more specific. R stands for realistic. Are these goals realistic over a year time frame? Probably, depending on your situation for the money. And pounds I can tell you from experience, definitely. But if I'm gonna sit here and say, lose a hundred pounds and look like Dwayne the Rock Johnson and I'm starting off scrawny, it ain't happening, man. That ain't realistic. I'm will never get there. If I want to make two billion dollars and I don't even own a vehicle yet to make money in, not realistic, right? Another important one is timely. What specific time are we going to make these, right? So lose 12 pounds, we'll say by end of year, because it's new year. So we're setting a specific end date for both of those. Next one, is it attainable? Attainable and realistic kind of go hand in hand. But is this something I can actually do? Do I have the skills to know how to do it? So if I want to make$100,000, do I have the skills to know how to make$100,000? If I want to lose weight and I want to lose that 12 pounds, do I have the skills to lose that 12 pounds? Maybe, maybe not. Or better yet, can I hire somebody that can help me hit those goals? So losing 12 pounds, come here and hire a personal trainer. We can definitely help you get there. Make more money, go hire a business coach. I'm sure they can help you get there. The last one, and obviously this is completely out of order, just so you remember it better, is measurable. So when we're setting goals, we want to make sure they're measurable, making sure we can track them, right? If it's not a number, it is going to be impossible to track. I want to be happier in my relationship. How the hell do you track that? Actually, you can, but not as easy as you think you can. There are specific psychological tests you can take to track your happiness on a day-to-day basis. Track it every single day, take a timesheet off of it, and you can put a measurement to happiness and you could score it every day. So you can track, but generally saying I want to be happier, probably not. So now we got some articles. I'm gonna talk specifically more from an entrepreneur side and making more money. But I wanted to use the lose weight example because it really relates to everything we do here and how people plan out their lives to move forward. So let's really talk about this. Alright, everyone's favorite number. One million, baby. How many people always say, I want to be the millionaire? I want to be in the million dollar club. Great. So I want to do that, hit a million dollars in my business by the end of the year. Right? So, how much do I need to make per month? Who knows? The threes, baby. Everyone has a general idea of how much it costs to make a million a month. Now, because uh math, we're gonna do this quicker on the phone than I'm gonna do this in my head. Take a million, divide it by 365. So this is our per month. And then our per day is$2,739.73. What am I doing here? Why why do I why am I breaking a million down to a per month and then a per day? I'll tell you what I'm doing. I'm trying to come up with a more realistic number that doesn't scare the shit out of me. That scares the shit out of me. What does that mean? I'm gonna get decision paralysis, I'm gonna panic, I'm not gonna like I can never hit that. Screw it. But the per month now seems a little more realistic. The per day? 2700, that sounds a little more realistic. Okay, so let's do it even better. Per hour. So, how much money do you need to make per hour? So take a million, we're gonna divide that by 52 weeks in a year, which gives us 19,000. Now, when you figure out per hour, you're not gonna be working 24-7, right? So let's take that out of our mindsets right now and talk realistically. Average entrepreneur can give 60 hours a week of work. So if I'm working 60 hours a week, I need to make$321.51 per hour. And this is off of a 60-hour work week. Now for funsies' sake, let's take that same number. And let's figure out if we worked four hours. I used to work eighty hours a week. Wild. I know. But you know what? It's possible to work eighty hours a week when you need money. All right. I want you to look at this. How much more achievable does that number seem per hour? Easy. How much even compared to the 60? So if I make this range from the 50 to 60 to 80 hours a week, it's way more attainable. Now the real question is to talk about vehicles, right? So what vehicle do you have to hop in in order to make that amount of money? I'm gonna use specific examples from my industry, but there's other industries, the math works out to be exactly the same. So, what gives me$240 per hour over 80 hours? Well, we're open more than 80 hours a week, but I'll use it as an example from me specifically working if I was personally training everybody. This here is two clients. That's it. Two clients paying roughly$120 per hour. So I need to find two clients paying$120 an hour every hour for 80 hours for the course of the year, and then I make a million dollars. Now I look at this and I say, okay, how do I find two clients every single hour? Well, then the question becomes, how do you find leads? Right? And there's a couple different ways to make to get leads. You have referrals, you have um paid ads, you have organic marketing, and then you have ambassadors and some other little ones, but I really want to focus on these main three. So referrals, organic marketing, and paid ads, right? So for those that have the funding for paid ads, how much money do I need to put into Meta that's gonna give me a certain amount of leads? That's knowing your CAC. Your CAC is your cost of acquiring a customer. How much money does it cost me to get a customer? I know it costs me$1,000 to get one customer to sign up. If I need two clients every hour, I gotta spend$2,000 an hour to get a client. And you're gonna look at me and go, Anthony, no one has that kind of money. I'm gonna tell you you're wrong. Why are you wrong? Every single person listening to this in the entire United States has access to free capital with no interest for 30 days. Every single one of us. Yeah, it's in your pocket. Credit cards. When you pay for something on a credit card, right? Do you owe that company that money right then and there? No. You have 30 days to pay that credit card off, meaning you have a 30-day window to pay the entire depth. You just got interest free right there. Wild. Take it a step further. You're new, you probably have access to this. Credit cards have 0% interest for 12 to 24 months. Now you want super high capital. Let's say you need$30,000, right, to pull up, and you can spurn all that in the first month. You don't gotta pay that back for a year, two years with no interest. Now you just plug and play for your paid ads. So there's one step. Anthony, I'm not a risk taker. Screw that. I understand. So you have the other two avenues, the free ones. Referrals and organic marketing. And what are these? Referrals is your current client base. People you currently work with, you should know right now how many clients you have to text in order to get them to refer you. Whether that's one in 20, one in 40, one in 50, let's say it's one in a hundred. I need two clients, I text 200 clients in that hour, I hit my goal. And I just do that straight for 80 hours. Or I can blend this. Organic marketing, because Anthony, I'm brand new, I don't know anybody, and I live in a um a small town. So organic marketing works one of two ways. Online would be posting content like this, right? Video content. It would be going out to chamber events, going out to business networking events. How many people do you have to talk to in order to get a singular client? So when I was working by myself and doing this all myself, I planned out hours where I would be out organic marketing at these chamber events because I knew how many I would have to go to to get a client. I knew how many people I had to talk to to the client. I didn't go with just the intention just to show up and be like, here I am, guys. No, I need to talk to 50 people and one of them will become a client and I'll be able to pull them in. Even better, you all have these in your pocket. I want every single person to open up your phone right now and see how many contacts are in your phone. I'm sure it's hundreds. Have you ever texted the people on your phone? Have you ever asked family, friends, if they know anyone that would be interested in your services? And if you've done this before, if you've never done this before, how many people do you have to text in order to get that many clients to come sign up? Most businesses, one in a hundred. That's it. Text 200 people an hour. That is easy. For some of you, right, you're texting your phones like 600 people an hour. But very easy to do to reach out just on your phone. And this is my focus right here. Two people per hour. Now I'm gonna blow your mind. Let's blow your mind, right? So two clients, 120 an hour has been our basis off of this, and we've learned that we have to just text, let's say, 100 people to get one client. So we take 120 an hour that each client's paying. So hour one, we signed up two people, right? So 120 becomes 240. Hour two, 240 becomes 480. Hour three, 480 becomes 620 per hour. Have a recurring business, take 620 per hour, and that's only after you're working three hours, and you hit a million bucks in under 40 hours a week if you did nothing else and you just retained every single client. Nothing. Literally nothing. So a million now becomes way more realistic. Okay, how does this portray the New Year's goals? Great question. Now we can backtrack. Hope everyone understands. If you have questions, leave them in the comments. I'll answer them later. So let's go back. Now, what do I do, Anthony? I understand the math. I understand that everything is a numbers game in life, and all I have to do is learn to manipulate them. So, our goal, like we said, is to make one. Let's write it out this time so it looks prettier. One million dollars. I don't know, that was a bad reaction. We're gonna write out some months here. April, and I'm gonna abbreviate the shit out of this. Maybe June, July, so many months. August, September, October, November, and December. Alright, so I want to make a million bucks more over the course of the year. Logic says, based upon our example, to take a million, divide it by 12, and it's$83,000 a month. Not realistic, right? So if we're looking at this kind of scenario, instead, a million is gonna be backloaded, right? Because you're not gonna put all the effort into it in this month in January, but the effort itself is gonna compound over in December. And this is where it becomes a little more business specific. So in the fitness world, everyone knows we're waxing and waning during different times of months based on motivation levels of people. Either net months are net positives or net neutrals or net negatives, depending on the month. So for my sakes, I know January, February, March, April, May are all great net positive months for us. June, giant net negative. Like, we'll put a sad face. July, positive, August negative, September negative, October positive, November positive, December negative. Now I'm looking at this as waxing and waning trends. So I can look at this and say, okay, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight months of positive. And then I got four months of a really sad face. He's crying a little bit because people don't care about fitness in those four months. Sad. Alright, so I can no longer make that 83k in these four months. So realistically, all I got is eight months to make my money and say, okay, I made this million bucks, and now I can open more locations and help more people. Alright, on top of that, we look for uh specific promos. So are there any kind of promos that you're running? And I'm not gonna break into this, I'll save it for a later video. But if you have a promo heavy month like we do in October, November, it does skew this a little bit, but we're gonna keep this for recurring and reoccurring businesses. There's a difference, look it up, but recurring and reoccurring. All right, so eight months. We're starting at, we'll say zero dollars. Zero dollars. We are sad right now. All right, so January, February, March, April, May, we got four months we need to backlog, and then we got four months we need to net to make up or backlog, and I'll explain what that means. So if we have 83 per month, this is where I usually use an AI, it makes life so much easier instead of doing this all handwritten math, but it's fine. AI is wonderful. You plug all this in and it gives you everything back proportionally. Like, wow, that's great, awesome. So if I'm looking at January as an example, let's say I'm making, I'm just gonna make this easy math. 20,000 for January. Let's say I gained again in February, I went to 40,000. Let's say I gained again in March 60. You see how these numbers are below this amount, right? That's because I know after four months of positives that I'm gonna be above this, and then that's gonna back add to hit the goal. So if I just write this out, and this isn't gonna be perfect math, I'm just doing this to give you an example. So we don't gain in these months, we just put net zero here, one twenty, one two, three, one twenty, one twenty, one forty, one sixty, and then one sixty. So we took this number, and we have four months that are above it the same incremental difference, and then below it, four months a differential difference. And that's still gonna equal our amount of money here. Because all I do is split the difference. I took, if you're 12 months a positive, go to month sixth as you're hitting the exact number of month. Before that, increment it down, up that increment it up, and then if when you add everything together, you get the exact million that you need to hit, if that makes sense. Hope I'm not losing people off of this because this is where it gets confusing. So we only now know we just need$20,000 for a specific month to increase to hit our goal, right? So let's whip out our handy-dandy calculators. I feel like that's a show, your handy-dandy calculators. Take the$20,000, divide that by 4.2, because that's the amount of weeks in a month. It is not four. So if we do that off a weekly basis, it's$4,762 per week. Divide that again, let's say, by 60 hours a week, we need to now only profit on top,$79.37. Extra. So every hour of a 60-hour work week, we need to only make$79.37, which then quo carries into the 20, and we just double that, and everything's carried over month, over month, over month, and all of this compounds, because it's always the same. It's always that number. And now I know if I need to hit a specific amount of people to bring that extra$79 an hour, or you want to do it a per week, the extra$4,700 per week, I know exactly how many people I need to talk to, how long that needs to take, and it's way more of an attainable number that's gonna compound on itself than anything in the world. And obviously, for people selling subscription services, this is what makes the most sense, right? Subscription world, this will be live, breathe, die. Everything, people are recurring, they're not stopping, they're constantly paying. And of course, you can get complicated with turn, how many clients you're losing a month, compared to how many you bring in, and you can edit it. But I wanted to simplify this as much as humanly possible because it shows the amount of effort that goes into planning an entire year. But this number, these here, seem way more achievable than this. This is nothing, nothing compared to this. And we get so gung-ho about I'm gonna be a millionaire, I'm gonna do this, and we get so obsessed with this that we fail, or we don't have the brain energy to figure all of this out and plan out an entire month. So I challenge you, go home, plan out how much money per month. Write it out like this. Print it out on a sheet of paper. Print that sheet of paper multiple times. Take it and paste it in the top three spots you are the most on the refrigerator, by your bed, by your computer. Obsess over it. I have an eight-foot whiteboard in my office that I see every single day. And I have these numbers written out in front of me every single day. It's a reminder of what I need to do, how I need to hit it, and how I'm going to get there. This is a simplistic version, and things get more complicated and people get overwhelmed. But do this. Start on the right foot and truly change how you do your next video. You like more stuff like this, please let me know in the comments. DM me, like, subscribe, and share. I'll see you next week.