Our columnist John Sanei explains how to make the most of 2025
Don’t suffer for miserable success. In 2025, many of us have already achieved many of the goals we once set ourselves.
We realise that things have sped up; we have a lot of synchronicities in our lives, and they have really increased in pace and speed. What I see a lot, especially living in Dubai, is a lot of incredibly wealth people who are miserable. We have achieved SO much, and because our dopamine has been so exhausted and we have had so much business and movement around us, we arrive into our expensive cars or expensive homes feeling miserable! I recently had dinner with a wealthy friend who was in exactly this situation – successful yet upset, stressed and unhappy. Miserable in his success.
When I was writing my journal and intentions for this year, I was imagining buying a new place in Cape Town. I haven’t even finished renovating my place in Dubai yet, and I’m already thinking about what I want next – we are never happy! We are always looking for the next thing, and it resonates as miserable success. Miserable success is, in fact, just another way of saying we are lacking gratitude. The awareness of miserable success is the first step towards creating a happier future.
I’m a futurist. I dissect the future, and I categorise and contextualise it for organisations and leaders to give them a better understanding of how to prepare. But I have to be honest; it doesn’t matter how well you do this; if you’re miserably successful – does it even matter how you plan for the future?
So, in 2025, let’s all focus on enjoying our success. Calm down, drink in your success, appreciate your success and get out of the mindset that if you appreciate it, you won’t be constantly looking for more.
This leads me to a quote that says; “Are you running away from the darkness or are you running away from the light?” From the outside, the person will look the same, but one has a dragon chasing him, and the other has an exciting future ahead. Why would you want to be the person with the dragon chasing you? This is a broken system – you should be looking on the bright side and enjoying your success, not running to the next thing.
As AI starts to come in and change so much around us, it may seem as though we have even more reasons to be miserable. But actually, the skill of creating contentment and an ability to appreciate what we have is a master skill. In that space, we realise that the universe has this weird way of giving us what we don’t chase. As we start to relax, these things start to come to us.
How to achieve happy success
The first point of all change is awareness. Once you become aware that you are trapped in this pattern that is the first step.
Secondly, the only way to change your brain and the way it thinks is to replace it with a new thought. You can’t just stop a thought. You need to create a habit that replaces the bad thoughts.
Then, put yourself into the practice of appreciation. I do this through meditation and journaling. Through that process, you start to slowly rewire the way your brain works and what you focus on.
Our problem is that we don’t want to be happy. We want to be happier than other people. We need to calm down, relax, be mature in our approach, be mature in our ambition, and allow this year to be a year where we sip in our success and allow that to be the theme of our year.
Setting goals for 2025
I like to set goals differently. I practice something called “memoirs from your future self.” This works by reverse engineering your goals. Rather than setting your goals, you put yourself into a headspace of December 2025, and you write a letter to yourself as though these goals have already happened.
This changes the way your brain thinks about your goals, so they become something you’ve already achieved rather than something you’re striving for.
Don’t get too stuck on your goals. Get busy living your life and then sometimes come back to them and remind yourself what the more significant focus is. The number one goal we should all be having if live every moment with maximum enthusiasm and zero expectation. If you can get this equation right, you start to enjoy being where you are rather than striving for what’s next. As a futurist, this is paramount for me because I can tell people the best things about the future, but if their emotional state is not in the right place, they literally won’t hear me.
