What to do right now if you want 2026 to actually matter
A systematic approach to intentionally creating the life you want
Every December, the same ritual plays out. People reflect on the year that’s ending, make lists of what they want to change, set goals that sound impressive, and convince themselves that this time will be different. By February, most of those goals are dead. By March, they’ve been forgotten entirely. And by next December, they’re back at the same ritual, wondering why nothing ever actually changes.
The problem isn’t lack of willpower or discipline or motivation, though that’s what most people tell themselves when their resolutions fail. The problem is that they’re treating New Year’s planning like a reset button. They’re optimizing for the feeling of having a plan rather than building the kind of systems that actually produce different outcomes. They’re thinking in short-term increments when what they actually need is a completely different approach to time itself.
Most New Year planning is designed to make you feel productive right now, it’s not designed to make the next year actually matter. If you want a year that counts, you need to think like someone who’s building for 2030 or 2040, not someone who’s trying to feel better about January or February.
Table of Contents:
Why most new year planning fails
What long-horizon thinkers do differently
Practical frameworks you can use right now
Why most new year planning fails.
The entire structure of New Year’s resolutions is built around the dopamine hit of setting goals. You sit down, you imagine a better version of yourself, you write down what that person does differently, and you feel good about having a plan. That feeling is the reward, and for most people, that’s where it ends. The goal itself becomes the accomplishment, and actually doing the work feels like an optional follow-through.
This is why people set the same goals year after year. Lose weight. Read more books. Start that side project. Learn a new skill. These aren’t actually goals in any meaningful sense. They’re wish lists. They’re statements about who you’d like to be if being that person didn’t require sustained effort over time. And because they’re not connected to any larger system or trajectory, they collapse the moment they require you to choose long-term progress over short-term comfort.
The other problem with standard New Year planning is that it’s almost entirely focused on addition. People ask themselves what they should start doing, what habits they should add, what new routines they should build, but they almost never ask what they should stop doing, what they should subtract, what parts of their current life are actively preventing the future they claim to want. You can’t add your way to a different trajectory if the underlying system is still optimized for the life you’re trying to leave behind.
Most people also make the mistake of planning from where they are right now instead of working backwards from where they actually want to end up. They look at their current circumstances and ask what seems achievable given those constraints. That’s not planning, that’s just extrapolating your present into a slightly better version of itself. If you want 2026 to actually matter, you need to think about what 2030 or 2035 looks like and then reverse-engineer what has to be true in 2026 for that future to be possible.