Happy New Year! 2025 Wrapped
And looking ahead to 2026
This year something clicked. It’s impossible to say what exactly - because these things aren’t of our making or choosing - but something did and I know that because I can feel it. It isn’t in the rational, conscious brain (the lesser of the two) but in my unconscious, feeling brain. The one that nature has been chipping away at for some 200,000 years, and many millions more when we were something else.
Many moderns reading this will hardly understand because it isn’t explainable, there isn’t proof, and that frustrates us. It takes us out of Universe Two and makes us feel uncomfortable because we can’t quantify it. We live in a culture that has decided that data and the individual are the idols and so when we’re confronted with higher forces we become squeamish. And so we operate every day in the hyper-rational, I-don’t-believe-anything-unless-you-can-prove-it-to-me brain, which naturally adds to our stress because the world isn’t explainable like that.
If you are working on accessing the feeling, intuitive brain, and try to express it to your friends and colleagues you can often see the frustration on their faces. When I stopped drinking two years ago, there was nothing rational about it (although you could make a rational argument for doing it). It simply occurred to me, felt immediately true, and so I expressed it to my wife and that was that. Sober as a salmon. When you tell modern people you stopped something because of epiphany, it either hardly registers, is scoffed at, or gets a good laugh.
The trick, it seems to me, is to accept this completely! Try to laugh with them even. It is absurd, and perhaps that’s the whole point. When you feel a connection to The Bigness that you know is true, good, and real, you don’t know where it comes from, and you don’t know what it is, so you might as well learn to laugh at it. It also frees you from the need to convince anyone of anything and that is a wonderful feeling. The only truth is what you do every day, consistently for a long period of time. What you plan, or say, or hope to do one day is irrelevant because process is all that matters.
This infinite process - what the youngs might call being in your bag - will give you the power to be creative, make good work, accept that time is a key ingredient to a good life, and will help you make relationships and stay open - not focused on the outcome at all. The outcome is a natural byproduct of process and there is no good outcome without pain, uncertainty, and the need for constant work.
I want to end the year with a Wrapped post - looking back at 2025, and ahead at 2026. If this is the year something clicked for you, then the next is when you make your best work ever. If you’re not there yet - and it hasn’t clicked - take the first step, find mentors that can help you, keep moving forward, be consistent, never give up, and start right now.
Life is for the living - there is no stopping this train - and so you might as well pull up your socks and get on with it.
Top Posts of 2025
I don’t think I’ve written better than I have this year, as a cross-section of time. That’s probably because I’m writing what I most want to write instead of trying to figure out what an audience might want. The way to sell more subscriptions and generate more reads in the short-term is likely doing the latter, but long-term it’s a fools errand. It won’t be your work if it isn’t your best work, and so you best write the work you most want to write.
Inevitably, the newsletter will become the first book - because designing, packaging, and producing books is what I most want to do. I thought the first book was going to be something else entirely, but it turns out it isn’t, because I couldn’t get around to writing it. I could only trudge along in the trenches I was already digging, and I now believe that that will have been the best decision I could have made.
When it comes to fruition, it might sell, or it might not. I won’t much be bothered because I will be busy writing the next iteration of the newsletter, which will in turn become the second book.
I sincerely hope you’ll join me. Here are the top 5 posts of 2025, in order of those you liked the most.
If I were to add 3 more that I most enjoyed writing, it would be those below.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
The Best Writing of 2025
This was a great year of writing and reading. I really enjoy Tyler Cowen’s Year in Review, but I’m going to deviate from the format and simply lay out some of what I loved reading this year, regardless of when it was published. I seem to be in a moment of either revisiting something I’ve loved, obsessively reading everything someone is currently doing, or thematically reading - like in the case of my multi-year November Project.
I’m reading every single post Chris Arnade puts out, as he walks the world.
I’m reading almost everything Craig Mod is putting out, although his pure walk-and-talk format has changed as his life is changing (i.e publishing bestsellers).
My November Project launched last year, and this was Year 2 - Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.
I read True and False Magic twice this year - once in April, and once in December. Phil Stutz makes sense to me in a way that few writers ever have (3 of them), and that is rare to find.
I re-read Michael Lewis’s Boomerang - the book that started a lot of things for me in my category.
J.K. Rowling continues to get better as she ages - which is far from a given. The Hallmarked Man was excellent.
Interestingly this is the year I started reading the Christian canon - starting with an NLT bible (New Testament) and C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy.
I read Amphibious Soul again (always in summer) and loved it all over again.
I finally got around to Thiel’s Zero to One and enjoyed it.
I read The Complete Man - a biography of Ian Flemming and a Christmas present last year - and came away with an extreme range of emotions. I can’t decide if that is good or not.
Paul Graham’s seminal essay How to Do Great Work. I wrote a trilogy about it this year and it’s only essay I’ve ever read where the Notes are as interesting as the essay itself.
BONUS: I run a Daily every year. 2025 was Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws - my favourite of the genre.
Please join me on Goodreads - a very wholesome place to be.
The Best Podcasts of 2025
For this one I will follow Cowen’s model and give you a running list of my favourite podcast episodes that were released in 2025. Even-though it feels like podcast-overload, the audio genre is in it’s infancy and this is part of the process of working itself out. I predict we get more specialized projects that eventually get amalgamated into something different, like books, courses, services, etc. It is a very human thing to be doing - having conversation with one another.
Top 10 - in no specific order:
Here are 7 episodes that were not published this year, but that I kept coming back to. Even I don’t know why I do that, but I do, and I’ve learned to listen to that intuition. The living, feeling brain is much smarter than the conscious brain.
As always, I encourage you to join my podcast community, here. It’s currently 60+ of my all-time favourite episodes, from many years of obsession with the genre.
The Best Docs of 2025
Back to the same format here as the book portion of this post - the best documentaries I watched this year, regardless of which year they were published. I’ve long had fantasies of hosting a rolling Tuesday night documentary viewing party called Docos & Tacos and maybe 2026 is my year. I’ve included mid-length YouTube here too.
You’ll notice in almost all of these categories we find ourselves in the world of outdoor pursuit and adventure sport. I seem to be in a Bavarian moment. The Bavarian’s, as you’ll know if you’ve read Natural Born Heroes seem to do everything, all the time. Weekends doing some kind of alpine pursuit that does the body, mind, and spirit good. These are exactly the things I most want to do in 2026, and that in and of itself is a discipline that requires constant work.
Tell me what you’re most excited about doing in 2026 in the subscriber chat.
A Quick Note on 2026
2026 is going to be a wonderfully productive year because I’m going to say No Thank You to almost everything. This is a good feeling and it’s the right mentality for the moment. I know what I do well, and I know what I want to do this year. I have too many enjoyable hobbies and the jobs to be done are crystal clear so frivolousness has to fall away.
That isn’t to say that I won’t leave space for boredom and sacred work, like the rest ethic of the Sunday Sabbath. In fact, it means the opposite. If discipline equals freedom, then saying no creates more space, not less. Space matters to doing great work, as does focus, and so this year I’m combing the two.
I thought that I would be on to my next subject by now - something I can’t unsee and you won’t be able to either - but there is still clearly a point to be made in my current vein of work, because I can’t seem to put it down. What that probably means is the newsletter has to become a book. I don’t know exactly what the point of that book will be yet, but I daresay it has something to do with how we’re through the looking glass now and so we have to adapt and change as the future demands. That doesn’t mean progress for the sake of progress - accelerationism - but a great remembering paired with the advances we have made that serve us well, like preserving life when there is an acute illness.
We have to forge a new path, together, in a world defined by movement, technology, and change. There are some practical things we can do - daily disciplines we can implement right now that can help us navigate the times successfully.
Here are some of the newsletter concepts I have in the hopper for early 2026:
Two appendices to the How to Do Great Work series that are hyper-practical and that you will love
An expansion of the Let There Be Light post while in the wonderful country of Mexico - you can’t be virtually equatorial and not write about it.
Are cultures/can they be path dependant? I.e. can they do things without knowing exactly why they’re doing them, but they can’t seem to stop?
Revisiting, and updating, the Creators and Curators idea. Much more juice to squeeze here with incredible shorts like this one.
More on Scenius at all levels. Why did it happen where it happened? What’s the time component? The when might matter just as much as the what and why.
Bigness all the way down. From factory farming, to Costco, to Apple. Can it really just all be big?
Discovery of, and answering the question - what’s the world’s best latitude? And why doesn’t longitude get as much airtime? You would be flabbergasted how interesting this is to me.
And the rebirth of localism (and optimism). Even in our biggest economies!
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All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you in 2026.
