How to plan an epic 2025, without setting goals | Jesse Itzler

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, it's the end of the year, and forget New Year's Resolutions, we have something much better. So in the next hour, Jesse Itzler is coming on, and he has an entire process for planning a monster 2025

**Jesse Itzler** (0:10)
I don't want to play catch up, I want to attack. Like now, I'm taking control, and I'm dominating the year, not other people taking it away from me.

**Sam Parr** (0:20)
Jesse is an incredibly successful guy. He started Zico Coconut Water, he started a private jet company, he sold to Warren Buffett, he's an Emmy Award-winning rapper, he's got four kids, he's an ultra marathoner, he lived with David Goggins. If you don't want to learn from this guy, something's wrong with you, you're broken inside.

**Jesse Itzler** (0:36)
If everybody does the three things that we're going to talk about in 2025, and does everything else the same, at the end of the year, if they see me in an airport, they're going to bear hug.

**Shaan Puri** (0:47)
I just saw Shaan writing, like, I take notes.

**Sam Parr** (0:50)
These are my golden nuggets from this episode. My pen died halfway through.

**Jesse Itzler** (0:55)
And now you added 20 winning habits. You're f***ing Jason Bourne.
You're Jason Bourne.

**Sam Parr** (1:03)
Jesse's amazing. He tells us this process that he's been doing for the past 25, 30 years. I'm pretty pumped about it. And I think he will be too.

**Jesse Itzler** (1:19)
I'm glad to be back, man. I love your show. I love that you got me back as a repeat, as a repeat offender. Let me just start by saying that I love December. I think December and January are critical months for the 11 or 12 months that follow them. As we head into the new year, the first thing that I do, like any business in America, when we get to the end of the year, they close out the year. They have review sessions, what worked, what didn't work, what was successful, what wasn't successful. They give themself a grade, et cetera. And I found that a lot of people don't do that in their own personal lives. So I like to take a little inventory in December and just kind of have a little review process around how the year went and take inventory on my own personal year. But no one taught me how to set up my life. No one taught me how to deal with my emails and no one taught me how to schedule properly. I didn't take a class in school that like, hey, you're going to have four kids. You're going to get bombarded with emails from the school with all kinds of appointments and Zoom calls that we didn't have back then. And your calendar is going to fill up with other people's requests for your time, like, how do you want to deal with that so you have enough time to do things that you want to do and achieve the goals that you want to do within work and outside of work? No one taught me that. And then layering children and layering a wife that works in a business as an entrepreneur and, like, how do you do that? So, you know, like, I'm a product of Trial and Error. I tried a lot of stuff. I didn't grow up with a phone. I was scheduling everything on a paper calendar for literally 45 years of my life, you know.
And I had to figure out, like, as my life evolved, how to grow with it. So I have a pretty cool system. I'm happy to share it with you guys. It's worked really well. It's allowed me to balance a lot of things and get a lot of things done and I think it's pretty simple. And I will preface it by saying that as you get older, how old are you guys?

**Shaan Puri** (3:28)
35 and 36, right?

**Sam Parr** (3:29)
Yeah, 36

**Jesse Itzler** (3:30)
All right. So you got another maybe decade before this hits, but it will hit and it's inevitable. As you get older, creating newness becomes really hard because you live in routine, you know, and like it gets very comfortable to live in routine. And really I found that the only way to really guarantee that you create newness, and newness is important. It's important to relationships. It's important to your momentum and your enthusiasm and your success and your excitement towards things and your growth. The only way to create newness, I found, is to plan it or leave room to be spontaneous. So, I become a really aggressive planner. And I feel like a lot of us play life on defense. Our calendars fill up with other people's requests for time. Like I mentioned, Zoom calls, weddings, appointments, school stuff. And at the end of the year, you don't have a lot to show for it.