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.
What long-horizon thinkers do differently.
People who think in decades don’t start with January 1st. They start with a version of themselves that exists ten or fifteen years from now and work backwards to figure out what that person had to do in order to get there. This isn’t visualization or manifestation or any other kind of motivational thinking. It’s structural planning. If you want to be running a specific kind of company in 2035, what does 2030 look like? What does 2028 look like? What has to be true in 2026 for any of that to be possible?
When you work backwards from a long horizon, your decisions in the present stabilize. You stop reacting to whatever feels urgent this week because you’re optimized for a trajectory that most people can’t even see yet. You start noticing which opportunities actually serve the long arc and which ones are just distractions dressed up as progress. You become much more willing to say no to things that don’t compound over time, even when those things would feel good right now.
Long-horizon thinkers also understand the difference between leading indicators and lagging indicators. Leading indicators are the things you can measure right now that tell you whether you’re on track. Lagging indicators are the things that won’t show up for years but that actually matter in the long run. Most people obsess over leading indicators because they provide immediate feedback. They check their follower count, their revenue this month, their progress on whatever metric makes them feel productive. But the things that actually determine whether your life looks different in five years are almost entirely lagging indicators, and those require you to trust the process long before you see any results.
This is why long-term thinkers focus on systems instead of goals. Goals are about hitting a specific target. Systems are about building the kind of life where hitting that target becomes inevitable.
If your goal is to write a book, you’re dependent on a single outcome that may or may not happen. If your system is to write every day regardless of how you feel, the book is just one of many things that will eventually emerge from that structure. The system compounds. The goal just sits there waiting for you to feel motivated enough to chase it.
Practical frameworks you can use right now.
If you actually want 2026 to matter, here’s what you do instead of setting resolutions.
Map your 10-year trajectory before you plan your quarter. Sit down and write out what your life looks like in 2035. Be specific. What are you working on? What have you built? Who are you surrounded by? What does your day-to-day look like? This isn’t a vision board exercise, this is a forcing function to make you think about whether your current trajectory is actually taking you anywhere worth going. Once you have that picture, work backwards. What has to be true in 2030 for that to be possible? What about 2028? What about 2026? Now you have a map. Now you can plan your next quarter in service of something that actually matters instead of just optimizing for feeling busy.
Identify your lagging indicators. These are the things that won’t show results for two to three years but that compound massively over time. Learning a new skill that will be valuable in five years. Building relationships with people who are solving problems you care about. Creating content that builds your reputation in a specific domain. Investing in your health so you’re not dealing with preventable problems in your forties. Most people ignore lagging indicators because they don’t provide immediate feedback, but if you’re not working on at least three things right now that won’t pay off until 2027 or later, you’re not actually building a future.. you’re just managing the present.
Build forcing functions that make short-term comfort impossible. A forcing function is a structure that removes the option to stay where you are. Quitting your job before you have another one lined up is a forcing function. Publicly committing to ship something by a specific date is a forcing function. Moving to a new city where you don’t know anyone is a forcing function. These are high-stakes moves, and they’re not appropriate for every situation. But if you’re serious about making 2026 different, you need something in your life that makes it impossible to default back to your old patterns the moment things get uncomfortable. Motivation fades. Forcing functions don’t.
Create accountability structures that aren’t based on motivation. Motivation is a feeling, and feelings are unreliable. If your plan for 2026 depends on staying motivated, your plan will fail. What you need instead are structures that keep you moving forward even when you don’t feel like it. This could be a weekly check-in with someone who will call you out if you’re bullshitting yourself. It could be a financial commitment that makes quitting expensive. It could be a public project where backing out would be embarrassing. The structure doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it exists. You need something external to you that holds you accountable when your internal systems fail, because they will fail. That’s just how humans work.
This is exactly why I built the Daily 5 framework—and now, the Conscious Creation Tracker that sits on top of it. The Daily 5 is a structured journaling system designed to surface patterns you can’t see when you’re stuck in the day-to-day. Most people journal reactively by writing about what happened today, how they’re feeling right now, what’s bothering them in the moment. That’s useful for processing emotions, but it doesn’t help you see the larger trajectory you’re on. The Daily 5 forces you to track the things that only become visible over weeks and months: recurring thought patterns, behavioral loops, decision-making tendencies, the gap between what you say you want and what you actually do. It’s designed to make your lagging indicators visible before they become problems, so you can course-correct while there’s still time.
For 2026, I turned that into a full Conscious Creation Tracker. It’s a 12-week overlay (Weeks 13–24: January through March 2026) with daily logs, weekly reviews, monthly check-ins, and a Sunday “AI synthesis” ritual where you feed the week’s data into a model and let it mirror back the patterns you’re missing. It’s not a cute planner by any means. It’s more like an operating system stress test for your life.
Quarter 1 (the first twelve weeks) is already available for paid subscribers, and Quarter 2 begins January 5th. If you want to go into 2026 with actual clarity about what’s driving your decisions rather than just hoping this year will be different, you still have time to work through Q1 and build that foundation before Q2 starts. You can’t change a trajectory you’re not aware of, and most people are operating completely blind to the patterns running their lives. This is one of the few tools designed to actually fix that.
Ruthlessly cut everything that doesn’t serve the long arc. This is the hardest part and the part most people skip entirely. Addition is easy, but subtraction is often painful. But if you don’t cut the things that are keeping you stuck, adding new habits and goals won’t change anything. Look at how you’re spending your time right now. How much of it is actively building toward the future you mapped out? How much of it is just maintenance, distraction, or avoidance? What would you have to stop doing in order to have the bandwidth for what actually matters? Most people are already operating at capacity, which means they can’t add anything meaningful without subtracting something first. If you’re not willing to cut, you’re not serious about changing.
2026: the year of conscious creation.
Most of what I’ll be talking about next year will live inside this idea of conscious creation, treating 2026 as an open lab for building and breaking systems in public. The essays, the prompts, the tracker, the behind-the-scenes experiments are all different ways of asking the same question: if you stop outsourcing your future to “someday” and start designing it on purpose, what actually changes?
But it’s not just the future people outsource. Most people hand over their present without even realizing it. They default to autopilot, reacting to whatever the algorithm serves up, letting the news cycle dictate their emotional weather, letting TikTok trends shape their interests, letting convenience shape their choices. Their attention gets negotiated away a few seconds at a time until there’s nothing left that actually belongs to them.
Conscious creation is the opposite of that. It’s the discipline of noticing what you’ve allowed to colonize your mind. It’s the refusal to let your nervous system be dragged around by whatever is loudest. It’s the ongoing work of reclaiming discernment—deciding what deserves your focus, what deserves your energy, what deserves to influence the way you think and act. Mental sovereignty isn’t a mindset; it’s a practice, and it begins in the smallest moments: what you reach for first in the morning, what you pay attention to when you’re bored, what you let into your head when your guard is down.
2026, for me, is the year of seeing all of that clearly. The year of counting the places where I drift, where I disappear into distraction, where my system defaults take over. The year of reintroducing intention into the parts of life most people sleepwalk through. That’s why I built the Conscious Creation Tracker, because I needed a way to measure how often I was actually here, in my own life, instead of being carried downstream by everything else. (Plus I just love data!)
The actual work.
None of this is sexy… it’s not inspirational in the way that New Year’s content is supposed to be, and it won’t make you feel good about yourself the way setting resolutions does. But it will work, which is probably more than you can say for whatever you did last January.
The people who are going to look back on 2026 as the year that actually mattered aren’t the ones who set the most ambitious goals or who had the most inspiring vision boards. They’re the ones who understood that the future is built in the boring middle, in the unglamorous work of showing up when nobody’s watching, in the willingness to make decisions today that won’t pay off until long after the excitement of New Year’s has faded.
You don’t need a reset button, you need a trajectory. And if you’re willing to do the work of actually building one, 2026 won’t just matter, it’ll be the year you finally stopped waiting for your life to change and started architecting it instead.
I hope to see you there—talk soon.
I love this. Especially the framing that the future isn’t built by motivation, but by identity, consciousness, and the systems that support both.
Most people never change because they’re planning from the same identity that created their current reality. They don’t realise the real work is learning how to update the self that’s doing the planning.
Conscious creation, in the real sense, is the shift from living on autopilot to actually authoring who you become.
If you don’t know how to use your mind, direct your awareness, or guard what gets planted in it, you can’t build a life that feels like yours.
I’ve been writing a lot about this too... especially how the next 10–15 years will demand an entirely different level of awareness. 2026 feels like one of the last years where you can consciously turn the trajectory of your life before the acceleration becomes overwhelming.
Love seeing this conversation happening more publicly. We’re clearly tapping into the same universal signal. 🤍
This is so inspiring! Been thinking a lot about the long game, and this idea of identity lagging indicators is just what I needed to see the bigger vision. I can't wait to sit down and journal about my 10-year trajectory, identify what needs to be subtracted, and have a system that feels aligned with where I want to be. I feel as if I've been constantly trying to add more, add more systems, make more time, and it's nearly impossible without subtracting what's not working. Thank you for this beautifully honest piece 🖤