2025 was a great year. I learned a lot and feel closer to my potential than ever before. I'm eager for what's ahead and to get the most out of the next 12 months.
Here is what I hope to achieve this year, and some of the processes I want to implement.
I've dreamed of living in the bay area my entire life. I love the west coast: the ocean, cyprus trees, hills, and more. But what I love most about SF is that it is the frontier. If you want to do anything novel and groundbreaking, SF is the best place to be. I feel that I must move to the city and am looking forward to the experiences that await me out there.
Create value that clears a number in my head. Money is the measure. Everything else is noise.
Take every advantage of the new medium. 4 tweets a day about the things I'm thinking about, no slop. I am really not fond of tik tok, but I am going to treat it like facetime and document a journey. Promote the business and podcast. Just post dude, the evidence is clear that it will change your life.
Moving to a new city, I want to make new friends and find people who inspire me and make me aim higher. If there is someone I find interesting in public (or online), I must talk to them. 1 interesting conversation with someone new each week. I hope to get really good at small talk.
Going for fit cyclist physiognomy. Ultramarathon in March. Gym at least 3 days a week. If the hair isn't cutting it anymore, bic and beard. Guy pearce/ tyler durden physique, no excuses.
I'm not putting specific goals or processes for how to do this, but I want to get out of my reading slump and establish consistency.
Every year I have a motto that I hope to revisit throughout the year. For 2026, there is a parable from the Sufi teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen that I want to remember. Beetles fly around a brush fire, each trying to describe its totality. One sees only heat, another smoke, another light. The King Beetle, unsatisfied, hurls himself into the fire. He is utterly transformed by the flame, finally understanding the whole in his last moments. This is, of course, a useful way to think about our relationship with a loving and omnipotent God. We cannot understand our lives and our place in creation simply from an outsider's perspective. Necessarily, the only way to figure out what is "really going on here" is to hurl yourself into it fully. Attempting outside inspection yields nothing useful because you are totally and utterly within it.
As I revisit the story, I find the failures of the other beetles useful for thinking about what it means to live a life of faith. First, there is the Professor. He approaches the mystery with his credentials and logic. "That's no mystery to me," he says. He returns with detailed observations. They may be technically accurate, but his words have "neither light nor heat." This is the trap of pure intellectualism: believing that naming something is the same as knowing it. The Professor can catalog the fire's properties without ever being warmed by it.
Second, the Lieutenant. His motivation is personal wealth. "I'll earn the King's favor," he thinks. "One day all he has will be mine." He returns with a narrative description, speaking of ash clouds that look like vanishing birds. The King rebukes him: "We didn't ask what it seems like, we asked what it is!" The Lieutenant gives us aesthetics without understanding. He is moved by the fire's beauty, but he approaches it as something to use for status or reward. Even his genuine encounter becomes transactional.
Finally, the King. Without hesitation, without looking back, he flies into the flame. He understands the fire in its totality only by being utterly transformed by it. There is a chapter in Mere Christianity where C.S. Lewis asks whether the Christian life is hard or easy. His answer is, essentially, that it is the hardest possible thing until you stop trying to do it yourself. Then it isn't. The Professor and the Lieutenant both fail because they are still trying to get something from the fire—knowledge or reward—while keeping themselves intact. The King gives up on that project entirely. He allows himself to be utterly transformed, and only via that transformation and total release can he reach any understanding at all. That's my goal for 2026, to hurl myself into the fire.