9 important questions to ask yourself right now.

Warning: They could seriously change your life.

At the end of every year, my wife and I try and take time to intentionally reflect on the past year and dream about the year ahead. This year, I think that exercise will be a much richer experience because of nine questions I found.

These nine questions come from

Katherine Johnson Martinko

of the blog, The Analog Family. She admits that she borrowed them from

Courtney Martin

, but I want to give her the credit since she introduced them to me. The questions aren’t your run-of-the-mill inquiries. They’re deeper. Richer. Better.

As Katherine says, “They’re not your typical ‘What was the highlight of 2024?’ kind of questions, which I find boring, but the sort of questions that make you pause, feel a flutter of excitement and nervousness at the prospect of answering, and then give you something to think about long after you’ve responded.”

Each question could give enough fuel for an entire conversation, that’s how good they are. So as you contemplate 2025 and what happened in 2024, don’t feel bad if you don’t answer all of them. But please take time to ponder at least several of them.

So without further ado, here are the nine questions.

1. What did you pay a lot of attention to this year?

2. What is something that has grown “normal” to you that you would like to see with new eyes in 2025?

3. What was one of the best conversations you had this year? What made it so memorable?

4. Where did you feel stuck? Where do you crave an adventure, whether literally or metaphorically?

5. What was a thing you had a hard time admitting to yourself this year?

6. What would you prioritize next year if you stopped having an “after-life mentality,” as Oliver Burkeman puts it (i.e. that you are living for some future reward moment)

7. What did you shed, let go of, or give up this year? How did you get lighter?

8. Whose relationship to time do you admire most? How can you apply their mentality to your own life in the coming year?

9. What are you grieving? How could you carry that grief more collectively?

As the infomercials would say: “But wait! There’s more!”

I was so intrigued by this exercise I went over to Martin’s blog, The Examined Family, and found five more questions that I think are vital. In fact, number 14 below had me thinking for about an hour (and also brought me back to an episode of “The Office”). I’d suggest picking one from this list as well: