In 2025 I learned to be radically honest with myself.
Turn off the fluff, quit posturing, and get down to the real business.
It’s not easy. But it’s necessary.
I learned a lot of lessons last year that I’m carrying with me into this year, and I wanted to share them with you.
So here’s 26 hard lessons to start your 2026 off right.
I hope they are as impactful for you as they have been for me.
Let’s go.
Every big company in the world is literally hijacking your mind and farming you for dopamine. They’ve weaponized psychology to keep you addicted, distracted, and agitated, extracting your best energy, leaving you weak and helpless, all for profit. Food, social media, video games, shopping, everything. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. 2026 is your year to unplug yourself from the matrix, delete what owns you, and take back your nervous system.
Stop goal setting. Start habit setting. What you do consistently is what you do successfully. Studies have shown that outcome goals (a goal for what you want to achieve) are minimally effective. Instead, setting a process goal (what you will DO consistently) can produce 10x more results. It takes 3–6 months for a process to become a habit (AKA part of your identity) so consistency is vital.
You have zero control over outcomes. The only thing you control is what you do right now. When you're fixated on results, you treat everything you do as an obstacle between you and what you want. That's why nothing works. You're doing everything half-heartedly because you're mentally somewhere else. This split attention basically guarantees mediocrity. Wherever you are, be there. Whatever you're doing, do that. Fully. The outcome will take care of itself when you stop obsessing over it and start enjoying the process.
Your body is the vessel through which you accomplish everything in life. If it's not in optimal condition, you're physically limited in what's possible. That means protecting your health, fitness, nutrition, sleep, and energy… at all costs. Some things you can't control. Most you can. Treat your body like the irreplaceable tool it is.
The hustle bros have it backwards. Not resting between periods of hard work isn't impressive. It's destructive. You're burning out your nervous system and missing the expansive well of creativity that only appears in the space between effort. Your best ideas don't come during the grind. They come in the shower, on a walk, in the pause. Rest isn't weakness. It’s a breeding grounds for innovation.
Unfollow every business guru for 90 days. The answers you're looking for aren't in someone else's framework. They're in the direct experience of building your thing. Every hour spent consuming is an hour not creating. Input without action is just procrastination disguised as learning. You already know way more than you need to start.
The quality of your social life has a direct effect on the quality of your overall life. Host the dinner party. Text the friend you haven't talked to in months. Call your parents. Stop waiting for others to initiate. Stop giving your energy to people who drain you. The energy you put into relationships is what you get back. Your social life is one of the biggest predictors of happiness, mental health, and longevity. Zoom calls, comments, and DMs aren’t enough to fulfill you.
Stop trying to overcome resistance. When you feel heavy dread before starting something, don’t force yourself through it. Listen to it. Find out what it’s afraid of. Ask what it’s protecting you from. It will give you a goldmine of valuable wisdom.
Almost everything you believe about yourself is just one possible perspective. Pick one core belief about yourself, "I'm an introvert," "I'm not creative," "I need coffee to function", and act as if the opposite is true for one day. Most of your identity is just a story you've been telling yourself, and in many cases that story was given to you by other people.
Stop telling yourself lies in the name of “positive thinking” and start being real with yourself. If you feel like crap, acknowledge it, don’t bypass it. Forced positive thinking is just masking negativity. What you resist persists, what you feel heals.
Almost all media (social media, news, ads) is designed to make you anxious and reactive. They win when they get you riled up about something that has little to no bearing on your life. Unplug from the news, social media, and other peoples’ opinions. You don’t need them. Pick 2-3 domains that matter to your work and life, ignore the rest. Protect your attention like your life depends on it (because it does).
There's nothing to improve. You're not a project. The entire self-help industry is built on the lie that you're broken. You're not. Self-improvement doesn’t actually happen when you focus on improving yourself. It comes when you accept where you’re at and let yourself be who you are.
Sell half your possessions. Everything you own demands a piece of your attention. You need space to store it, energy to maintain it, mental bandwidth to manage it. You think you own your stuff, but your stuff owns you. When you get rid of things, the space you create externally creates space internally. A cluttered environment is a cluttered mind. Get rid of what doesn't serve you. Use the money to do something you've never done. Own less, experience more.
What most people teach about "personal brand" is just ego dressed up as strategy. It’s performing a character instead of being a person. Stop performing. Stop posturing. Stop trying to be known for something. You’re not more important or special than others. And that’s okay. “Authenticity” can't be engineered. Just do work that matters and let people make up their own minds about you.
Every meeting is an interruption masquerading as productivity. Meetings turn minute-long conversations into hour-long discourses. Most meetings exist because people are trying to outsource their thinking to someone else. For 30 days, replace every meeting with an async Loom video or Slack message. Watch your productivity double and your stress cut in half.
Every time you reach for your phone when you're bored, you're aborting a potential insight. Sit in waiting rooms without scrolling. Stand in line without distracting yourself. Let your mind wander. The best ideas arrive in empty space. Can you sit for 5 hours without doing anything but breathing? If that sounds hard, ask yourself why. What are you afraid of? That same fear is probably holding you back in many aspects of your life.
Fitness apps, sleep scores, step counters. These are valuable tools for data, but don’t outsource your body awareness to algorithms. Stop relying on a tool to tell you how you feel. Learn to feel when you're tired, when you're recovered, when you need to move. Intuition beats data when it comes to your own body.
Almost everything about who you are and where you are today is a result of decisions you’ve made up to this point. It’s all your fault. Some things are a result of other peoples’ decisions (or other things you can’t control). That’s their fault. But it’s still your responsibility. Take ownership.
Literally nobody else knows what you should do. Any advice they give you is just a projection of their experience onto your life. Work with mentors that help you find your path, instead of selling you on theirs. You already know what to do. Asking for advice is abandoning your intuition to use somebody else’s. Learn to trust yourself. And find mentors that trust you.
You're exhausting yourself trying to explain your choices, your values, your path to people who aren't equipped to understand. They are not you, they don’t have your experience. Let them misunderstand you. The right people will get it without explanation. The wrong people won't get it even with one.
You mistakenly believe that moving faster will give you more progress. This is not universally true. One meaningful output can give you more progress than 10 years of frantic busywork. You just don’t know this because you’ve never slowed down enough to experience it. Your addiction to speed might robbing of you of profound insights that could change your entire life in a heartbeat.
You make thousands of tiny decisions every day that are stopping you from achieving your goals. You don’t even know you’re doing it. If you’ve struggled hitting a goal for a long time, it’s because a part of you doesn’t want to achieve it. Accept that, and ask what it’s protecting you from. That’s where you’ll find the unlock.
Stop living for a person who will never arrive. "Future you" is a fantasy you use to avoid being present with your actual life right now. You tell yourself you'll be happy when you hit the goal, make the money, lose the weight, find the partner. But that future moment never comes. Because when you get there, you just create a new "future you" to chase. This is the hamster wheel of deferred living. The only person who actually exists is the one reading this sentence right now. The only moment that's real is this one. Your future self isn't waiting for you to finally show up. You're the one who needs to show up. Right now. Not in the future.
Everything worth doing requires time, and rushing it guarantees mediocrity. Every time you cram a task into an insufficient window, you're choosing speed over substance. You're producing work that's "done" but not good. Give your work the time it actually needs, not the time you wish it needed. This doesn't mean procrastinating or being precious about every task. It means honest assessment. Some things take 20 minutes. Some things take 20 hours. The same fear that makes you procrastinate also makes you rush. It's just two sides of the same coin. Slow down enough to do it right. You might produce less but you’ll accomplish way more.
You're drowning in input, podcasts, articles, courses, books, videos. You've confused learning with doing. Information without application is just entertainment. For every hour you consume, create for two. Write, build, ship, make something. Even if it's bad. Especially if it's bad. Creation is how you integrate knowledge. Consumption without creation is just intellectual hoarding.
You've got the hierarchy backwards. You're sacrificing your health to make money, then spending that money trying to buy back your health. You're selling your time cheap for financial security that never arrives. Here's the truth: without health, nothing else works. Protect your sleep, your body, your energy, even if it costs you money. Second, protect your time. It's the only non-renewable resource. Money can be made again. Time cannot. Stop trading hours for dollars just because something pays. Third—and only third—optimize for money. Money is a tool, not a scoreboard. If the opportunity costs you your well-being or your presence, it's too expensive. Get the order right or spend your life winning the wrong game.
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I hope you enjoyed this letter.
If you want help applying these principles to your life, building a significant business, and growing your audience online this year:
Book a strategy call with me 1:1
I’ll look at your exact situation and show you how to scale it to meet your goals.
Let’s make 2026 your best year yet.
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