Continuing the tradition from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2025.

Runway

The word of the year I chose for 2025 was “Runway.” I couldn’t really explain it much when I chose it, and I can’t really now either.

It was mostly a feeling, albeit a vivid one. At the beginning of last year, everything felt… tight. Like there wasn’t enough room anywhere. Like I was boxed in. That was certainly the case financially, feeling like every month was barely above breaking even. Work-wise, I felt stuck too. I wasn’t really working on anything I really wanted to; mostly the stuff that I felt I had to.

The people around me weren’t the right people. I felt stuck in outdated ways of thinking, old models, and things I didn’t believe that everyone around me seemed to.

But I do know that I built some runway, somehow. I know some portion of that was making some brave choices about how I wanted to be spending my time, even though it was new and I didn’t know how it’d pan out. I know another portion of that was completely liquidating the IRA I started two decades ago as an employer-matched 401K and rolled over many times as a way to give me more time to build my new business without worrying about cash. Yet another portion was taking every opportunity I could to do the things that make my life feel full.

(More on all of that below.)

I still can’t describe it well, though I have a new feeling now:

Accomplished.

I’m ready for what’s next in 2026.

The life I want to live

I organized last year’s year in review post by the kind of life I want to live. I liked that, so I’m repeating that format again this year. I find that if I’m doing these things, I’m generally living a full life:

1. Photograph the wonders of the world
2. Eat at Michelin-starred restaurants
3. Play basketball
4. Buy rare sneakers
5. Hire a personal chef/house manager (new for 2026)
6. Attend 3 Eagles home games and 3 Sixers home games (new for 2026)

Photograph the wonders of the world

The world is incredible.

Since I started traveling 2 decades ago and picked up photography again seriously a decade ago, the combination of these things has been one of my favorite things to do.

My goal was to travel about once a quarter. I doubled that in 2025.

This year I visited:

1. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
2. Phoenix, AZ
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Boise, ID
5. New York, NY
6. Chicago, IL
7. West Virginia
8. Chandler, AZ
9. Palm Springs, CA

I took 21,960 photos in 2025, 24% more than the 17,739 photos I took in 2024.

I made a small but important upgrade this year. I had been shooting with a Canon EOS R since 2020. It was my first experience with a full frame mirrorless camera since I was shooting with a Canon 6D Mark II, so I bought the R used in case I didn’t like it for whatever reason. Five years and a hundred thousand images later, I think it was safe to say that I shot with it enough to know that I was sticking with it.

A few of the buttons and dials were getting a little finicky, so I investigated a few repairs. I learned that R had been discontinued in June 2023. I rented the Canon EOS R6 Mark II for a few days and immediately loved it. It was pretty close to the R that I was used to, but everything was improved. Better ergonomics, no 4K video crop, two memory card slots, better autofocus, in-body stabilization, better sensor, and a lot more. I found a great price on eBay and bought my first brand new full-frame mirrorless camera.

I haven’t looked back since.

Some of my favorite shots of the year:

I organized a few group photo shoots this year, like cherry blossom meetups in Washington D.C. and Central Park.

I took Sidda and Char for a few day road-trip through Arizona to see the other-worldly landscape and have some fun.

As has now been my annual tradition for the last five years, I took a few days to photograph fall foliage changing. This year, I went to West Virginia with a few old and new friends.

My brother invited me to celebrate his birthday with him this year. He and his friends are avid golfers, and all he wanted this year was to play as many rounds as we could in two days. I’ve never played before, and the group was kind enough to not be too visibly annoyed at how much worse I was than all of them.

(I learned that I’m awful at driving, but my short game’s not bad though!)

I had a blast, and I can definitely see how addicting that hobby can be.

I’m also reminded that I don’t have to travel far away to get glimpses of the amazing world. Here are some shots from the Philadelphia Flower Show, right in my municipal backyard. One of these photos actually won an honorable mention in a local photography competition! While I have zero professional aspirations for photography, I love the affirmation that this is a serious hobby I can get better at over time, which is exactly what a competitive person like me loves.

For travel in 2026, I’ll be taking a few of the top students in my coaching program to a remote location (TBA) to spend a few days workshopping some long-term visions for their businesses. More info on that soon.

My family also has a tentative trip planned to Japan to see the cherry blossoms there, although we may have some other conflicts that may push that trip back to another time.

Eat at Michelin-starred restaurants

One of my rich life goals is to eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant at least once a quarter.

That brings my lifetime total of Michelin stars to 38.

Some quick internet sleuthing says the average foodie has somewhere between 15–40 stars, while “Michelin sickos” are closer to the 80–250 range.

I aspire to be a Michelin sicko in my lifetime.

One notable tidbit here is that all of my Michelin-star experiences this year were paid for by someone else. One was a industry event, the second was a sponsored event I hosted, and the third was a business expense for people interested in growing their agencies. I have more ideas like this for 2026 where I can mix business with pleasure.

(Drop me a line if you wanna collaborate here in 2026.)

That said, this goal isn’t just about Michelin stars. It’s a fantastic shorthand for the level of excellence my palate would like to experience, but it’s not infallible. Michelin awarded stars to Philly restaurants for the first time ever this year. Incredibly deserving are Provenance (went last year), Friday Saturday Sunday (haven’t been in a few years), and Her Place Supper Club (haven’t been).

Notably missing from that list is Royal Sushi, my favorite restaurant in the world. If there’s any Philly establishment that’s a shoo-in for a star—more than one in my opinion, as I’ve eaten at 2- and 3-star restaurants that don’t touch what Jesse Ito does—it’s Royal. Most of the explanation is credited to how incredibly difficult it is to get a reservation, but that sounds like even more of a reason to be on the list than not. Michelin is supposed to award the best restaurants in the world, not the best restaurants in the world that are easy to get into. We already have that. It’s called Yelp.

The best dishes I’ve had all year were at Royal Sushi, by far.

Some new restaurants I ate at this year: 1906, Cafe La Maude, Stir, Taqueria El Farolito, Emmett, Upland, Sushi Zero, The Social on Eighth, Percy, Kin, The Farm & Fisherman Tavern, Maman, Yakiniku Toraji, The Dearborn, dancerobot, Canaan Valley BBQ, Roots, Murphy’s Law Irish Pub, Born & Bred, Chubby Cattle, Uchi Philadelphia, Louie Louie, and Newtown Bagel Co.

Same goal for 2026: a Michelin-star restaurant at least once a quarter.

Play basketball

The more I play basketball, the more I enjoy it.

My goal for 2025 was to play about once a week, which is what I’ve averaged for the last 4 years.

I played 57 times this year, which is slightly above my goal!

This year, I also found a way to play with a few different groups of people, which is always a great challenge. Playing with the same people and same courts, you start to know what to do and get a little complacent. Playing with new groups definitely keeps the skills sharp.

For one of those groups, the place we played at for the last two decades closed their doors this year. End of an era for sure; lots of good memories there. A bunch of us literally grew up together with that place as the through-line. We’ll have to find a new place to play in 2026.

I organized a basketball game again this year at Figma’s Config conference for the third year in a row. Nick Pattison and his team at Primary cooked up some sick merch for us!

I played in a game organized by the folks at Showit’s Spark conference. They designed custom reversible jerseys for everyone with one side inspired by Sixers’ jerseys in my honor!

Now these are my kind of conference after-parties!

Basketball goal for 2026: play at least once a week.

Buy rare sneakers

I got some great new sneakers in 2025. I wanted one each quarter, and I ended up slightly above average.

1. Air Jordan 1 Retro High Utility “Stash” Black/Anthracite-Sail-Off Noir
2. Air Jordan 1 “Camelia” Purple/Infrared/White (custom)
3. Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG SP Union LA Chicago Shadow
4. Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG “Shattered Backboard”
5. Nike Zoom LeBron 2 Beast

One of the different things in my sneaker game this year is that I got 2 pairs as gifts! My team got me a custom painted pair to match my new website, and I received another pair as a thank you from a designer I gave some career advice to and made some connections for.

Same sneaker goal for 2026: about one per quarter.

Hire a personal chef/house manager

This is a new one for 2026, one I’m kinda scared of.

As evidenced above, I like delicious food. But I don’t like eating out all the time, mostly because my body can only handle so much rich food at a time. So, as much as I appreciate fine dining, I also like eating simple, clean food at home.

I cook dinner for my family on Mondays and Wednesday and Em cooks Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a Friday night family ritual of either getting Poke bowls or Chipotle, or both. We play weekends by ear.

I like to cook more than Em does, but we both definitely agree that it’s so time consuming. We’ve optimized grocery ordering and pickup and prep and cleaning as much as we can, but it’s still too big of a chunk. We’re both growing more cognizant of what we want to be spending our time on, and cooking is not in either of our Zones of Genius. Doing takeout more is an option, and even if we could afford it, it doesn’t leave us feeling the best.

The solution is a personal chef, one who can have the different kinds of meals a family of four needs and wants ready when we need and want it. We flirted with the idea a few years ago, and even found a great chef who wanted to leave the restaurant world for something a bit slower. Unfortunately, we were on wildly different pages about how much we wanted to pay and how much they needed to make.

Having a personal chef seems like such a luxury. It feels extravagant. Decadent. Like sleeping on a bed of caviar every night just because I can.

I think of myself as someone who has money to afford some luxuries, but I don’t think of myself as rich.

I’m slowly reframing that.

Yes, many rich people are excessive. And many rich people are also people who value their time and energy and optimize for doing as much of the things they want to do and as little of the things they don’t want to. I’m starting to see how this kind of “extravagance” can actually be savviness.

Maybe it’s not that rich people get to do anything they want. Maybe the outcomes are actually the inputs. Maybe focusing on what they do best and outsourcing the rest is what made them rich. This has been a no-brainer for me when I’ve hired contractors to do things I could do myself but really shouldn’t be doing, like bookkeeping or building websites. Why is cooking any different? Or laundry? We already have a cleaning crew do our house every 2 weeks.

I’m slowly coming around to a new frame on this, and I’d like to try and make it happen in 2026.

Attend 3 Eagles home games and 3 Sixers home games

Philadelphia is a great sports town.

The Eagles won the Super Bowl last year and in 2018. Joel Embiid was the league MVP a few years ago, and Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecomb are one of the most exciting backcourts to watch in the NBA today. The Phillies are consistently division winners and playoff contenders every year. We’re getting a WNBA team in 2030.

I had a goal of having season tickets every year to the Sixers and Eagles. But I only went to one Sixers game last year and no Eagles games. If I’m honest, I think the season tickets thing was mostly about status.

I’ll start smaller. Bring it back to the root: enjoy watching the incredible athletes on my home teams for the sports I love.

Hit me up if you wanna join me for a few Philly sports games in 2026.

Work

Many of the things that make my life full cost money to do, so I can’t talk about them without talking about what makes them possible: work.

That word has meant different things for me over the last few years:

• In 2022, I shut down my agency SuperFriendly and did a bunch of different things for work
• In 2023, I launched Design System University and consulted with a bunch of different teams on their design systems.
• In 2024, I consulted primarily with one company (The New York Times) and did some freelance work with half a dozen clients.

In 2025, work finally felt different for me in a lot of good ways.

Make More Money

At the end of 2024, I teased this:

In early 2025, I’ll also be start a group coaching program for freelancers, small studios, and agency owners that want to take their service businesses to the next level of income and reputation. I’m still working on the core of the program, so I don’t have a lot of details to share about it yet, but the general shape of it will be a combination of instruction, discussion, practice, and review so I can get specific, tactical, and actionable with everyone in the program.

If you’re interested in a program like that and can commit to spending a decent chunk of money (probably a few thousand dollars) and time (probably 3-6 months) investing in your business, subscribe to my newsletter and I’ll send out details once I have them to share. I’m committing to spending a good chunk of my 2025 helping designers level up financially and professionally.

On January 21, 2025, I hosted a Zoom call with 5 freelancers and agency owners—my early access group—and we just talked about business. No curriculum, no structure… just conversation. We met 7 times and talked about positioning, pricing, scaling, sales, lead generation, and systems. I tried to help them by answering as many questions as I could from my experience running an agency.

On March 14, 2025, I sent an email to my newsletter audience to soft launch my new Make More Money group coaching program. I explained who it’s for, the curriculum, the pre-order price and time commitment, and included 3 testimonials from people in my early access group. I got my first 3 paying customers that day, 2 more later that week, and we were off to the races.

My initial plan was to launch the program with a standalone video course, but I decided it wasn’t important enough to delay launching. So I called it a pre-order and figured once the video course was done, I’d announce the official launch and raise the price. But no one seemed to be complaining that there wasn’t a video course. So, one day in September, I decided I’d tell the next prospect the full price, and I started charging the full price to everyone from then on. I quietly launched the full video course on November 19: 42+ hours of training around purpose, positioning, pricing, lead generation & prospecting, sales, and operations.

I spent the rest of the year doing basically only two things:

1. Finding people who are a good fit for my program
2. Coming up with as many ways as possible to make the experience as transformative as possible for my students

I ended the year with 80 students enrolled in the program.

We’ve had 8 Money Makers of the Month since Apri:

1. April: Gabby Merite of Figures & Figures
2. May: Galo Naranjo of Motusmade
3. June: Joey Banks of Baseline
4. July: John Rodrigues
5. August: Jenny Lu
6. September: Tanish Jindal
7. October: Matias Gonzalez of Leidox
8. November: Celeste Fabros of Euflora

We’ve had 6 guest speakers talk to the group about various topics:

• John Saunders of 5Four Digital showed us how to build an agency that runs on SOPs
• Brad Hussey taught us how to use email as a primary lead generation tool
• Tsili Pines and Amie Pascal of NoCo showed us how to do strategic planning
• Mamie Peers of Red Pencil let me interview her about how she hires agencies as a CMO
• Crystal Vitelli showed us why every agency needs producers

I have big plans for what’s coming in 2026, but that’ll be its own set of posts.

I’ve generally always loved what I do for work, and this might be the most fun year I’ve had. I’m spending a ton of time and energy in my sweet spot: teaching, sharing what I know and have, pushing people to their potential, and creating new ways to help.

Since I shut down SuperFriendly, I’ve struggled with the idea of feeling like I had to do lots of different things to make ends meet. 2025 was the closest year I‘ve gotten to being able to focus my attention on one income-generating activity as I’ve had in a long time. I’m working hard to ensure that Make More Money is the only thing I’m working on in 2026.

Other than Make More Money, I did two other things in 2025 to bring in some cash:

1. Private design system coaching for a company that sent 24 of their team members to learn from me virtually for 12 weeks
2. A content sponsorship

Outside of that, I did some pro-bono client work for friends and family:

• I creative directed the website for Philly’s new restaurant dancerobot, designed and built by Jonas Leupe and NOOON.
• I creative directed the brand and website for Multiply Management, a branch of my brother’s company specifically to help nurses have enough money for retirement. Site designed and built by Jonas Leupe.

Design System University

Design System University has largely been on autopilot in 2025. Most of that is due to the fact that I personally don’t do much around design systems any more. I don’t have an agency that works on design systems with clients. I don’t consult with design system teams any more. I’m flattered when I’m tagged in design system posts and messaged about them, but there are now so many people who are much closer and well-versed with design systems than I am at this point.

I’m confident that our DSU courses still hold up though. While each a few years old, I tried to design all of them in a way that the principles still ring true even if the technologies and approaches evolve, and I’d stand by that today.

I have a small team on DSU that keeps it going. The Design Systems 101 course still sells every day, and the newsletter goes out to 15K+ design system enthusiasts every week.

Still though, a founder and CEO who’s losing touch with the main subject main isn’t the greatest strategy for any company. In 2026, I may look to find a new owner for DSU, one who really loves the space and wants more of an active community to share it with. Drop me a line if that’s you.

SuperFriendly

In October of 2024, I got an email from Peter Kang, co-founder of Barrel Holdings to see if I’d be interested in selling SuperFriendly, as it seemed like a good match for some plans they’d been hatching. I’d read a lot of Peter’s writing about agencies previously and was happy to have that conversation with him. We talked, met up for dinner and drinks, inteviewed some folks for the new team, and drew up some paperwork a few weeks later to make Barrel the new owner of SuperFriendly and me a profit-sharing board member.

In February 2025, Peter, Barrel co-founder Sei-Wook Kim, and new SuperFriendly CEO Jon Sukarangsan came to my house, covered my tables in post-its and my TV with rollout strategy decks, and we officially kicked off SuperFriendly 2.0.

We set a few revenue targets and my involvement was pretty minimal in joining quarterly board meetings and making introductions where applicable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough revenue coming in for Barrel to continue investing and decided to stop the new SuperFriendly’s operations in September of 2025. Peter shared more of the context on his blog.

As you might imagine, my feelings about this are… complex. I think I have some healthy and appropriate separation around it. I celebrated and grieved the SuperFriendly that was mine and I ran for a decade after I shut it down in 2022. I’m sad that Barrel Holdings’ SuperFriendly that I was a small part of had a 6-month false start. Those feelings are very different; I didn’t and don’t process them nearly the same. It’s easy for me (and others) to Monday-morning quarterback what coulda/shoulda/woulda happened, and Peter and I have done some retrospectives together about it.

Maybe we’ll see a new version of SuperFriendly sometime in the future

Pricing Design

One thing I’m thrilled about from 2025 is relaunching my Pricing Design book!

I originally published it with A Book Apart in 2016, my first foray into writing a book, developing with an editor, and working with a publisher. Because it was all friends, everything went swimmingly. I received quarterly royalties for 8 years since then.

In May of 2024, I received an email from the leadership at ABA that they’d be closing their doors soon and returning book rights to the individual authors. This coincidentally lined up with my personal strategy at the time to create, own, and distibute as much of my own intellectual property as possible.

I worked with Jonas Leupe to create new paperback and Kindle editions. We also published a new website where you could read the book in its entirety or get a free PDF emailed to you. I also took the opportunity to learn how to narrate an audiobook and produce an Audible version.

Overall, I’m glad to have this back in the world! Here are a few nice things people have said about the book:

I’m experienced in working for myself and this gave way more clarity in how to price by value. Great for beginners in freelance and the experienced.

This book gave me confidence to set realistic prices for my freelance business.

The best guide on pricing I’ve ever read.

This website

Last year, I said:

I… committed to taking this site seriously as an important part of my business by refining my branding and positioning, tightening up the information architecture and content strategy, and hiring a team to take over the production of the site.

…this will hopefully be the last post you read on this version of the site. That’s right: the new site is almost here.

Last January, I teased the new art direction and even shared a bit about the new content strategy.

And then… nothing.

For 11 months.

I’m sorry.

Yes, I’m still working on the new site. I hired someone and the design and build are 99% finished. The only thing left is to migrate all the content over, which isn’t an easy thing. Still, it’s close and I won’t overhype it until I’m a bit closer to the finish line.

In the meantime, I still did a lot on this current site.

I published 51 articles in 2025, 4% less than last year’s 53 articles.

My top three most popular posts this year:

1. This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design
2. The Wheel of Nothing
3. A Sneak Peek of the New DanMall.com

I will continue moving content over to the new site when I can. And someday, hopefully soon, I’ll flip a the switch and tell you about it.

Who coaches the coaches?

I run Make More Money as a coaching program because I believe in the value of coaching (especially as a separate style from other learning models). I think coaching is one of the biggest unlocks you can have. It’s all about maximizing performance. You can get a coach to help you with any area you want to improve in: sleep, business, flying helicopters, eating better, etc. All world class athletes have coaches. If Steph Curry—the greatest basketball shooter in history—has a shooting coach, we have no excuse.

At the end of 2024, I signed up for the Uplevel coaching program from Smart Coach by Ross and Jessica Johnson. It was a 6 month mastermind that helps established coaches scale online coaching programs.

I initially signed up to scale my design system coaching, but my coach Meleah helped me see the opportunity right in front of me for coaching design freelancers and agency owners. She helped me craft the offer, figure out pricing, write scripts and systems for different scenarios, determine priorities, set realistic and ambitious goals, hold me accountable, and so much more. I could not have launched Make More Money without her.

In October 2025, I enrolled in Dan Martell’s Elite Business Coaching. I’ve known of Dan for a long time. We talked briefly in 2012 when he was looking to hire a designer/coder for one of his startups. I read his book Buy Back Your Time in 2023 and it changed a lot about how I work. Over the last two months in his program, I’ve learned a ton about sales, marketing, how to coach, delegation, mindset, program dynamics, and so much more that I’ve been able to implement already.

Distribution

Going into 2025, I was pretty intentional at studying how effective my own distribution is, as opposed to utilizing others’. I needed some benchmarks.

In 2024, I spoke at 5 conferences, did 4 guest talks for other people’s communities, and appeared on 12 podcasts.

In 2025, I spoke at 1 conference, did 1 guest talk for someone else’s community, and appeared on 1 podcast.

But I hosted 2 of my own events and redirected all the rest of that time and effort to my existing audience. I taught and coached within my own program every week except 3; that’s 49 times.

And that doesn’t even count office hours I did with my students. If you do want to count those, I did 136 office hours in 2025, and I feel so much more helpful in these sessions than I do in more public venues because of the level of depth we can cover.

867 people downloaded the free PDF of my Pricing Design book. Around 600 people come to the site every month and stay for an average of 7 minutes.

772 people have taken my free email course on how to get clients.

611 people have downloaded my free projects spreadsheet that has 10 years of data about client projects.

I also needed to look at some of the biggest distribution vehicles I have where I do most of my content marketing: namely, social media.

Social media

At the beginning of 2025, my audience size was a little over 160K people across all of my channels. Like most people with a sizable audience, the default strategy is to grow it. Why? Honestly, mostly inertia. It’s easier to keep doing it than stop and rethink.

So that’s what I did… even if only by default.

Midway through the year, I read Million Dollar Coach by Taki Moore and stumbled across his idea of The Five Ones:

[The Five Ones] is the fastest way to get to a million dollars a year.

Color me intrigued. The idea is simple:

1. Pick one target market.
2. Pick one product.
3. Pick one conversion tool.
4. Pick one traffic source.
5. Do this for one year.

It echoed something I’ve heard before from Alex Hormozi: One Avatar, One Product, One Channel.

I thought I had already been doing this, but hearing it again landed differently. The piece that was still fuzzy for me was “one channel.”

Like a lot of people, my approach to social media has been “be everywhere a little bit.” Ironically, that’s the exact opposite of what I teach my students, where the advice is closer to: “be somewhere specific, a lot.”

I understand why this is difficult. It’s difficult for my students for the same reason it’s difficult for me:

Because it’s scary.

Still, I have less of an excuse than most. I’ve seen firsthand many times how narrowing focus creates leverage in products, positioning, and growth.

Time to do it scared.

At first, I framed it as, “Which single channel should I go all-in on in 2026?”

But I’m realizing I don’t specifically need one channel more than I need one anchor, one place where original thinking lives, and everything else has a clear supporting job.

But which one?

Let’s take inventory.

Across all channels, my total audience grew to roughly 183K people by the end of 2025, an increase of about 22K people (~13%) year over year.

That sounds impressive until you look at it honestly.

At this scale, that’s not hyper-growth. Hyper-growth would mean adding hundreds of thousands or millions of people. I’m not doing that, and realistically, I’m not trying to. At this stage of my business, I don’t think the constraint is reach.

It’s conversion.

More specifically, it’s how much work it takes to turn a conversation into revenue.

My primary sales mechanism is selling by chat, i.e. starting conversations with people who are already warm enough to engage. I don’t rely on funnels or automated closers. Revenue happens through conversations. That means the job is my content isn’t to “close” anyone; it’s to make those conversations feel warm, expected, and worth having.

Instead of asking, “Which channel gives me the most reach?” I think a more relevant question is, “Which channel most reliably reduces sales friction per unit of effort?”

In other words: which channel makes it easier to sell when I start a conversation?

For fun, I had my friend ChatGPT write a weighted scoring model that blends all the factors: conversion ease, growth, reach, and effort.

My newsletter wins by a mile.

It gives me repeated, long-form exposure to the same people over time. It lets me articulate my point of view fully, without compression or algorithmic distortion. And it creates familiarity before I ever reach out to someone directly.

I’m betting that‘ll show up downstream as:

• Faster replies
• Shorter conversations
• Less explaining
• Less convincing
• Greater willingness to commit

LinkedIn came in second, largely because the way I use it already resembles short-form newsletter thinking.

YouTube is a bit of a wildcard because there’s not enough data there. But conceivably, it could be more of a trust accelerator than a growth engine, a place where people can hear me think out loud, which turns out to matter a lot when sales happen through conversation.

Instagram and X, by contrast, don’t justify original effort for me anymore. That doesn’t mean I’ll disappear from them. It means I’ll mostly treat them as downstream distribution, not primary thinking surfaces. Specifically with X, it’s not easy to walk away from a 47K person audience after almost 19 years of active daily use, but the payoff just isn’t there.

Once I reframed everything around sales friction instead of reach, the strategy became obvious.

In 2026, my primary creative effort will go into original thinking for my newsletter. Everything else will either reinforce it, distribute it, or support the sales motion it enables.

That means:

• The newsletter is the anchor
• YouTube and the podcast (coming soon 👀) reinforce trust
• LinkedIn maintains visibility and recognition
• Instagram and X receive repurposed content, not original effort

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. The goal is to be clear, consistent, and recognizable in the places that actually move the business forward.

Expect a much tighter newsletter game in 2026, because it’s the most effective place to anchor the thinking that supports how I actually sell.

Everything else will earn its place by doing a very specific job.

Time and energy

Hours-wise, I worked 1,634 hours, about 31 hours/week. The distribution of my effort generally broke down like this:

(For a detailed description of the revenue breakdown, check out the 2025 info on my Salary & Income page.)

This is the first year in a long time that these tables tell mostly stories I like:

• I’m working on one primary project; the others are just a little bit, and mostly for fun.
• All client work is pro-bono. This is exacly the way I want it.
• The stuff I want to do takes up most of my time and attention. The stuff I don’t want to do takes up just a little bit of my time and attention.
• My top three tasks are marketing, direction, and coaching. Things I should be doing and want to be doing.
• I took more time off than I worked on my business.
• Design is only 12% of my time.
• Sales weren’t as high as I wanted them to be. That I’m only spending 9% of my time there is a good explanation.
• I spent 1% of my time trying to get at least 1% better.

A few goals around my work time and attention for 2026:

1. Drop “Design” to 10% or less of my time.
2. Eliminate “Admin” work completely.

Home & family

My running theme for the last few years around home and family remains the same: the more I share publicly, the more what’s private becomes more important. I’ll only share a little here.

Sidda’s 14 in 9th grade and Char is 12 in 6th grade. They’ve both been into school and community theater for the last few years and did 4 plays this year between the two of them: Legally Blonde, Jr., Shrek Jr., Beetlejuice Jr., and Peter Pan Jr.

They both picked up some sports this year. They both did jiu jitsu, and Char won 1st place in a tournament in February. They both play indoor field hockey, and Sidda did outdoor field hockey as well. Char also did a short stint of tennis lessons for a few months. They’re both avid readers, and, because of their ages, a lot of the TV- and movie-watching are trending towards coming-of-age stories.

Em has her own channels where she shares what she’s up to, so all I’ll say here is that she’s doing awesome, as usual.

Health, wellness, and self-care

I finished Invisalign this year! My teeth are a lot straighter. A nice side effect of that is that I’m more inclined to take care of my teeth, so I’m flossing and brushing twice a day. Now I compliments from my dentist about my oral hygiene at my regular checkups.

I still drink a lot of soda though. I say I’m gonna quit every year, but I’m afraid of the few weeks of withdrawal headaches. Maybe 2026 will be the year I do it.

I joined a stretching gym this year. They describe it as “yoga, but we do it for you.” It feels awesome every time I go, but I definitely don’t go as often as I should or could.

Books

Here‘s what you should know about my reading habits.

I abandon books liberally. At the first moment I’m no longer interested in a book, I stop reading it. I’ve done this in the first chapter of a book and I’ve done this in the last chapter of a book. When I abandon a book, I have no judgment about whether of not the book is good. It’s simply the wrong fit for me at that moment. I set it down and move on.

My star rating system:

• ★★★★★ = a nonfiction book that literally makes me make immediate changes in my life or a fiction book I fully enjoyed
• ★★★★☆ = a nonfiction book that is going to change the way I think or act very soon or a fiction book I enjoyed
• ★★★☆☆ = the book was fine but didn’t add anything new to my life
• A book would get lower than ★★★☆☆ is probably one that I already abandoned

In 2025, I read or attempted to read:

1. Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss (abandoned)
2. That Will Never Work, by Marc Randolph ★★★☆☆
3. Ready, Fire, Aim, by Michael Masterson ★★★★☆
4. Creative Directions by Jason Sperling (abandoned)
5. For The Culture, by Marcus Collins ★★★★☆
6. Batman: Resurrection, by John Jackson Miller (abandoned)
7. Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, by Jeremy Egner ★★★☆☆
8. Let My People Go Surfing, by Yvon Chouinard ★★★★☆
9. The Way to Wealth, by Benjamin Franklin ★★★☆☆
10. DCeased, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
11. No Bullsh*t Strategy, by Alex M. H. Smith ★★★★☆
12. DCeased: Unkillables, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
13. We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ★★★★☆
14. Professional Troublemaker, by Luvvie Ajayi Jones (abandoned)
15. The Five Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom (abandoned)
16. How To Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell (abandoned)
17. DCeased: Dead Planet, by Tom Taylor ★★★★★
18. Rejection Proof, by Jia Jiang ★★★★☆
19. Die With Zero, by Bill Perkins ★★★★☆
20. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson ★★★★☆
21. The Science of Scaling, by Benjamin Hardy ★★★☆☆
22. $100M Money Models by Alex Hormozi ★★★★☆
23. Play Bigger, by Al Ramadan (abandoned)
24. How We Grow Up, by Matt Richtel (abandoned)
25. Million Dollar Coach, by Taki Moore ★★★☆☆
26. The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (abandoned)
27. How Basketball Can Save the World, by David Hollander ★★★★☆
28. Turning Pro, by Steven Pressfield ★★★★☆
29. Freelance and Business and Stuff, by Amy and Jen Hood ★★★★☆
30. Scale with Purpose, by Jason Blumer & Ian Vacin ★★★☆☆
31. How to Decide, by Annie Duke (currently reading)
32. Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madsen (currently reading)
33. Rich Girl Nation, by Katie Gatti Tassin (currently reading)

Relationships

When I read The Algebra of Wealth last year, one line in particular stuck with me:

An obsessions with career and money (beyond what you could ever spend) begins to diminish what is the source of real satisfaction: relationships.

I have this line tightly tied up to each one of my full life goals: who would I like to share this with?

From travel to photography to food to basketball and everything else, I paid special attention this year to who I wanted to experience all of those things with. That is definitely a focus I will carry forward.

2026

I’m fond of this African proverb:

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

I’m ready to go far.

My word for 2026 is “Together.”

Wishing you a wonderful start to 2026!

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