Misogi 2025

Reflections on my big, overarching goal for 2025

I ran into the concept of the misogi on the very excellent “How to plan an epic 2025 in 56 minutes” episode of the My First Million podcast. The idea is:

A Misogi is an ancient Japanese ritual around cleansing and purification. We’ve taken the liberty to stretch the true meaning, and to us it represents a unique and challenging event that defines your year. It requires a journey of self-discovery and transformation, pushing one’s physical and mental limits to achieve a seemingly impossible goal. One thing that gives you purpose and cleanses the soul when completed.

It’s pretty cool. Having one overarching goal or event to summarize the year is a cool way to make 2025 impactful.

Here’s mine: this will be the third year in a row that “lose weight” is something I want to do in the next year. Meaning… I haven’t actually done a good job of it. If your resolution for 2023, 2024, and 2025 are all the same thing - you kinda blew it.

This year, my misogi is to completely transform my body composition.

What I love about this slight variation on my past resolutions are two things: one, body composition is different than losing weight. Not only do I want to lose weight, I want to lose body fat (emphasis on not losing muscle). I want to eat less processed foods, and cook more for myself instead of using Uber Eats. And I want to explore more holistic strength gains versus just lifting weights - which is obviously great - but not the whole picture.

I’m orienting every day of the year around my health. You could roughly say that my orientation on a day to day basis, for probably a decade now, has been around work. My morning routine is based around getting to work quickly. My time during the day is focused around what I need to accomplish at work, finishing tasks, etc.

And what’s awesome about the misogi approach is that I can look back on this year once I’ve completed it, and see that this was the year of body composition. I can say “2025 is the year that I got shredded” 😜

What I like about Itzler’s approach with the misogi also is that they add up. If you have one big, awesome thing each year, you can look back on each of them and feel super accomplished. I have to finish this one before I start the next one, but I’m really enjoying the perspective shift and finding it useful so far.