For 2025 I have set myself a challenge to try 25 things.

Back in 2023, I attempted a similar goal with 23 completely new things I had never done before. However, this was quite ambitious and I was unable to achieve all the things I wanted to originally do. But, this was okay! I created the challenge simply as a way of motivating myself to get out of my comfort zone and try new experiences I had never had the opportunity to do before. At the time, I knew this was very ambitious and I would not be able to achieve all these things I set out to do in just one year.

In 2024 I got as far as writing half a list but quickly lost site of what I was planning. Life became too busy and between the discouragement of not achieving the previous 23 and becoming waylaid with normal life, it just dropped off.

This year I want it to be different. I want to embrace the challenge and hold myself accountable.

To kick start this list of 25 things to do in 2025 I wanted to create a blog, to use both as a creative outlet and a keepsake of memories from the things I try in 2025. When deciding the things I wanted to try this year, I quickly realised that doing 25 new things in one year is actually pretty intense and involves completing  one thing every two weeks. This may not sound like a lot but when you start trying to fit them in around work and family commitments, and all the general (boring!) tasks that need to be done every day and every week, it starts to become a bit daunting to find time to get everything done… In order to stick to my plan to try all 25 things on my list, I need something to keep me on track and motivated. This is why I want to start the year with creating a blog. I plan to use it to keep me focused and prioritising my 2025 challenge.

Across the next year I aim to achieve 2025 new things – there is actually a slight caveat to this, in that I may have experienced one or two of these things before when I was younger and I want to try them again to see if I can do it any better this time around. 

I like order and I like lists… So when setting up this challenge and selecting what I wanted to have a go at this year, I needed to make it easier on myself then trying to rack my brain for 25 random things that I could try in a year. Thus, I needed to break it down into smaller chunks to bring order to the chaos in my brain. From this the five categories were born! Thinking of 5 things, 5 times over seemed a lot easier than boiling down all the possibilities in the world to just 25. Or at least this is the only way my brain would let me think of more than the first two that I came up with before hitting a brick wall.

The five categories include:

• Learning
• Travel
• Hobbies
• Sport
• Wildcard

Learning has always been important to me and given me a lot of fulfilment which is why I am a big believer that we should never stop trying to learn new things. The human brain is quite extraordinary in its ability to process and retain new information, as well as create new ideas. Learning something, no matter how big or small, continues to develop us and opens us up to new experiences. There are so many things I would like to learn how to do, even if I only get to do it once. I am excited by the opportunity to discover what I am capable of and which skills come naturally and which are heard learnt over many years of practice or through trial and error.

The importance of travelling to new places has been instilled in me from a young age. The older I have gotten the more freedom I have had to choose the places I go to. Visiting new countries not only exposes us to new languages, cultures and traditions, but also to new foods, customs and architectural designs. The world is so vast with such variety of landscapes that it is impossible to think it can all be seen in one life time. That, however, is a challenge I would like to attempt! Hence, this year I would like to focus myself on seeing new places and creating opportunities for myself to interact with the natural environments I could only dream about growing up.

Throughout my life I have tried many different hobbies. However, I have a nasty habit of trying new things only to give up on them if I am not immediately good at it. Unless I already have the required skills to do something, I am unlike to commit to doing it again – this is a terrible fault of mine. Because of this I have spent much of my life too scared to try new things expecting to fail at them. I made an attempt in 2023 to try new things outside of my known comfort zone and to be honest I surprised myself at how enjoyable it can be to do something even when you are bad at it! This is why during 2025 I would like to try 5 new creative hobbies to test myself and see if I will enjoy them, even if I am not naturally good at them (which is highly likely…).

As a child I was never a very sporty kid, I did the same as most other kids my age but never excelled physically. I also suffered some major injuries which stopped me from being able to walk for the most part of a year when I was at primary school. This then created some physical health issues for myself which persisted well into my late teenage years. It is only at university where I started to get more physically fit and could feel the difference regular movement made to my overall health and mood. I became happier and had a lot more energy even during my day-to-day life. So, while I will never be an Olympic athlete, I do enjoy the freedom that comes with having a body that can move and let me participate in fun activities. This year I would like to push myself further and see if I can develop new skills that let me do physical activities I have never been able to do before like running or even callisthenics.

Finally, when I was making the original list I had a few ideas that did not fall into these categories, so instead of changing them and potentially missing out on new things I want to try, I created the wildcard category. The aim of this is to contain all the weird and wonderful activities that I would like to try in 2025.