Our 9 Big Goals for 2020

Setting goals is tricky. If you set the bar too low, then you risk losing motivation to push harder and faster than you have before. On the other side, if your goals feel too unattainable, you can easily get discouraged and give up too early. One of my favorite quotes, however, is: “If your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.” This mantra provides the undercurrent for many of our efforts, and chasing those “big hairy audacious goals” gives us a thrill that we hope will motivate us to grow and find success this year.

One of the reasons why we publish our goals is to provide an additional layer of accountability. In a sense, by making our goals public, we are hoping that our community can help keep us accountable and on track to meet them. We wholeheartedly believe in the power of community, both physical and online, and hope we can support you in setting and achieving your goals.

This year, our goals are split into three categories: family, travel, and business. We came up with 9 goals across these categories, and we plan to track their progress throughout the year. Here they are!

Family Goals

1. Find a home base

This goal is honestly at the forefront of my mind this year! After celebrating 2 years of full-time family travel this summer, we are going to transition into a home base-centered lifestyle. Are we going to stop traveling? Absolutely not! But we are also ready to dive deep into a community this year. The only problem is… we don’t really know what that is yet, and it feels a little terrifying. We have decided that for several reasons, we will find a home base in the US. It’ll be nice to be closer to family again, closer to brands that we dream of working with, and to join a community where the kids can form long-term friendships. We have a few destinations in mind in Colorado, Texas, and Florida, so we’re excited to make a few trips this spring and find our next home!  We truly believe settling down will allow us to focus more on our business goals for the year as we won’t be juggling weekly moves and poor internet.

2. Level up our health and fitness

Working out while traveling certainly presents its challenges, but it would be an excuse to think it’s not possible. This year we’ve been focusing on eating healthier, which is a bit hard when you’re in front of a hotel buffet! But, we are motivated to maintain and even improve our health and fitness as we wrap up our second year of full-time travel. As an avid runner, I am setting a goal this year to run 500 miles, which would be an improvement over the 350 I ran in 2019. Additionally, I plan to run my first half-marathon this year in hopes to prep and train for a full marathon in 2021. For Jess, she’s motivated to get into a fitness routine by working out at least 3 times a week. We also aim to keep the kids active by visiting parks, playgrounds, pools, and going on walks and hikes routinely. When we find our home base, we’d like the kids to experiment with hobbies and find an active sport or activity that they enjoy!

Travel Goals

3. Visit New Zealand

Since we departed on our travels, New Zealand has been the #1 country on my must-visit list. We actually had plans to visit back in December of 2018, but we ended up cancelling our flights there because of an opportunity that we couldn’t refuse! So, in 2020, I vow to finally make it to this beautiful country. We are currently planning to spend approximately 3 weeks exploring New Zealand’s incredible landmarks, and meeting up with some families along the way.

4. Plan a trip to Japan

Similarly to New Zealand being my #1, Japan has been Santi’s #1 for a long time. He’s fascinated by all things Pokémon and Nintendo, and wants to immerse himself in Japanese culture. This year will be a bit tricky to plan a trip there due to the increased demand for travel to Japan for the Olympics, but we’re hoping we can squeeze in a time this summer or fall!

5. Visit 10 states in the US

For as many countries as we’ve visited throughout the past two years, I feel a bit ashamed knowing that there’s much of the US that we haven’t yet explored as a family. As we make our transition to a home base in the US, we are finally going to prioritize discovering and highlighting fun family friendly destinations in our home country! Because of that, we’re setting a goal of seeing 10 states this year. We don’t know which ones those will be yet, but I’m hoping to stay accountable to this goal by sharing it with you all, haha!

Business Goals

6. Create 100 blog posts

This goal first appeared on our list in 2018. And guess what? We failed miserably at it! I completely underestimated the amount of time it would take to create blog content while planning full-time adventures, posting on Instagram, making YouTube videos, recording a podcast, and working with brands on photography and social media campaigns. So naturally, the blog fell towards the back of our priority list, even in 2019 when our volume of travel increased. But this year, we are motivated to inspire you to travel more, whether that’s near or far. And our blog will be the focal point for actionable resources and guides to help you do that. The topics of mindset, goal-setting (or dream-chasing) and resolve-building is also very important to me, so you’ll also be seeing some of those topics (with a travel spin, of course) sprinkled throughout our publishing calendar.

7. Bring back the Podcast

In the past 2 years, we have produced two seasons of our Jetsetting Family Travel Podcast. We have loved all of your messages regarding the show and how it’s helped you understand a destination better! Recording and editing episodes while traveling was logistically very challenging for us, so I’m looking forward to finding time and space to focus on the podcast when we find our home base. The show is currently on hiatus, but I’m in the beginning stages of brainstorming for a potential season 3. I have a few ideas in my head for how to improve the show and provide more compelling content, and am excited to develop these ideas throughout the year for a Season 3 launch later this year.

8. Improve our photography resources

We like to set actionable and specific goals, so please excuse my goal-setting inner nerd while it yells at me for putting in this vague and nebulous goal. However, aside from wanting to know how we work with brands, questions about our photography style are the ones that we are most often asked. Jess has had big dreams for sharing her love with photography for a long time now, she actually purchased a domain name 2 years ago before we left to travel.  Jess has started to provide some free information and tutorials through her “Make it Frameworthy” Facebook Group, but this year we plan to take that to the next level. While the Facebook Group has been quiet (since we realized it was impossible to keep up on the road), we hope that group becomes very active this summer. We’re big believers that you don’t need an expensive camera to capture great moments (although it does help), and we promise to develop the resources to help you compose, shoot, and edit pictures you’ll be proud to display! We don’t know what kind of resources those will be quite yet, so if there’s something in particular that you’d be interested to see or learn, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

9. Reach 6 figures of revenue

Our final goal is perhaps our most important one this year as well. We are highly motivated to have a location-independent lifestyle even after we settle into a home base. This means we are doubling down on the value we provide through our business, and we aim to explore ways to continue serving others while being able to make a living ourselves!

Bottom Line

If you’re nervous about being able to reach your goals this year, then you’re probably in that sweet spot of goal-setting! Feel free to comment some of your goals for this year so we can help keep you accountable!