Make unrealistic goals.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, unrealistic goals motivate students to attempt to approach it, striving to make any progress or even end up reaching it. And what’s a great way to visualize these dreams as potential reality?
Vision boards!
During the first school week of 2025, Kaylie Argueta, the floral design and agricultural science teacher, encouraged all her students to make 2025 vision boards. The poster consisted of a collage of pictures and quotes, encouraging students to brainstorm potential places they want to go, cuisines they want to try, and academic or social experiences they want to achieve. Now, three months later, she reflects on her experience creating her own vision board, and how she has stuck with it.
“It’s hard to plan out twenty-five years down the line, even five years,” Argueta said. “But for goals, achievements, and travel places, a vision board gives you ideas to solidify that goal.”
Creating a vision board is not the only part of the goal-setting process. Following it is just as important.
“You can even put a pin like ‘I checked that off my vision board!’ and you would feel better,” Argueta said.
Mapping out goals on a poster gives people the free will to try to accomplish them, not restricting them to any order unlike a checklist, which is another common New Year planning activity. Beyond the common notion that vision boards are more for the aesthetic, similar to Pinterest boards, there are many innovative ways to track progress.
“Some people put pictures that they took accomplishing the goal and put it next to the picture on the vision board,” Argueta said. “But in the end, vision boards are for you. They are whatever you envision it to be like.”
Vision boards are not meant to perfectly and accurately map out people’s aspirations. Planning out the whole year when it just started can feel like a burden, but anticipating that the year could turn out differently makes unexpected outcomes exciting. This was Argueta’s intention in giving her students the task of a vision board.
“It’s a fun and good way to come back into the year, not doing something stressful like an arrangement,” Argueta said. “You get to think about what you want to think about. Many kids put colleges they want to get into, clothes, cars, [and] one girl even started a business. It’s all about helping y’all think about where you want to go. I really took it and ran with it.”
With various long-term dream careers and possessions, vision boards help students with shortsightedness—the tendency to hyper fixate on certain things or events that will happen in the near future. This behavior is common especially in youth. Upcoming tests, projects, or sports games every week may bombard students, leading them to forget their intentions of studying hard or training hard, which will eventually reflect in their future.
One way to address this problem is by setting goals that people don’t expect themselves to achieve. Striving for unrealistic goals reaps greater satisfaction when people make any progress towards it, further motivating and reminding them of the possibility of achieving an unreasonable goal.
“The board motivated me,” Argueta said. “One of my goals I won’t get to do is to go to Greece, but I’m manifesting. I also have Future Farmers of America on there, and the goal was to make it bigger at school and get it to grow. Last week I got to see many more people recognize and celebrate it than before.”
Even though some goals are not met by the end of the year, the exciting part of planning the year is the uncertainty on whether particular goals are met or not. Sometimes, keeping goals unrealistic can be greater motivation than one people are confident they can make. It’s a way to “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” (Steve Jobs)
