The world is a hungry thing

If you let it, it will take every hour you have.

Then ask for the next one after that.

So a couple of weeks ago, I took a few back.

Not for a big holiday or a massive trip.

I just needed to disconnect.

To put the phone down.

To look at something other than a screen.

When you step out of the daily noise, the picture changes.

The urgent emails, the negotiations, the reactive problem solving.

They all fade into the background.

The stress of the moment softens.

The actual lessons sharpen.

It certainly wasn't all wins this year. Never is.

And these are just observations.

A snapshot at a point in time.

Lastly, I really try not to prescribe anything, but at the end, there's an exercise that I highly recommend anyone do before setting any goals for 2026.

Even your own version of it.

But for now, these are the ideas that have stuck with me the most:

1. Ideas, focus, and execution

New ideas feel like vision.

They make you feel alive, useful, important.

But left unchecked, they become an idea reflex. A twitch.

A constant need to reinvent that destabilises teams and erodes momentum.

Progress rarely looks like a constant stream of new projects. Most of the time, it looks like finishing what already exists, then giving it enough time to mature.

You need a simple decision filter. Something like:

“Will this genuinely make the boat go faster?”

If the answer is not a clear yes, the idea belongs on the shelf, not in the calendar.

The bravest move is often protecting what is already working, and the people who are quietly running it, instead of chasing the next clever possibility.

2. Identity, masks, and honesty

There is a heavy psychological cost to maintaining a gap between who you are and who you pretend to be.

You can hold the mask for a while. You can curate, posture, smooth the edges.

But if you spend enough time making things, the truth of your life will bleed into the work whether you plan for it or not.

People connect more with honest, in progress reality than with a polished expert persona.

Sometimes the regression you fear, dropping the mask, is the prerequisite for real progression.

3. Technology, AI, and responsibility

Trust is a non-negotiable.

No efficiency gain is worth eroding a customer’s trust in you.

AI belongs where it helps humans do better work, not where it quietly replaces care with convenience. “Human in the loop” is not a slogan. It's a safety rail.

Ethical operators do not get to check out of this conversation because they are wary of tech. If you care about people, you stay involved. You learn enough to hold the bar on how the tools are used, and where they are not used at all.

4. Healing, grief, and carrying pain

After big pain, retreat is necessary.

Pulling up the drawbridge, going quiet, closing the world out, that is a survival phase.

But it is not a place you are meant to live forever.

You cannot out-think pain or out-plan fear.

Only movement heals.

At some point you have to step back onto the grass, and risk another bindi.

Trauma rewires you.

You lose some innocence and recklessness.

You gain depth, wisdom, and a clearer sense of what things cost.

Grief often does not disappear, it shifts.

Some wounds never fully close.

You simply learn the shape of them, and how to carry them without letting them hollow you out.

You are not failing if you are not “over it” on someone else’s timeline.

Still carrying a loss is human, not a defect.

5. Silence, and speaking up

A lot of us get through crises by focusing on what went wrong, then powering forward.

It works in the short term, but it delays the slower work of actually processing the grief.

Silence is dangerous.

Our aversion to talking about struggle sits underneath more statistics than we like to admit.

Strength is holding both pride and pain. You can be proud of how you showed up for others and still be honest about the toll it took on you.

Grand campaigns and big efforts matter, but small, honest conversations do more to keep people alive. Letting the armour crack a little is not indulgent.

6. Quiet ones, burnout, and workplace support

The loudest expressions of struggle are not always the most at risk.

Quiet achievers often carry the heaviest load and are usually the last to put their hand up. They will keep performing until something snaps.

On the other side, performative struggle and gaming support systems poison the well. It breeds resentment and makes it harder for genuinely unwell people to speak up.

Healthy cultures pair compassion with clarity.

You set expectations.

You notice patterns over time.

You make support systems safe to use and respected to use.

Good leadership is not only about offering help.

It is about building autonomy.

You teach people when and how to use support so they can self regulate before they break.

7. The weight of an industry

High performance industries can run on a constant fight or flight loop.

From the outside, it looks composed.

Professional.

Sometimes even glamorous.

Underneath, there is often very real uncertainty about income, market conditions, and security.

You cannot keep supporting clients through life’s biggest transitions if you refuse to support yourself and your team first. And you cannot pour from an empty cup, even if you are very good at pretending you can.

Tools like apps and therapy programs only work inside a culture that normalises using them, without stigma or career penalty. Without that, they're just branding.

8. Certainty, uncertainty, and impossible choices

In crisis, “how” beats “why”.

When you are at your limit, big purpose can feel very far away.

What actually keeps you moving is much smaller: the next step, the next corner, the next breath.

Some choices are impossible and leave permanent questions behind.

The work is not to find a neat answer. It's to live a good life alongside the grief.

Humans crave certainty, but often we have to keep living without full closure. Sometimes you move forward without the answers you thought you needed.

And trust does not always require years to build.

Shared hardship and radical honesty can compress the timeline and build real trust very quickly.

9. Action, pacing, and recovery

Mood follows action.

Motivation often turns up after you start, not before.

Waiting to “feel ready” is usually how you stay stuck.

Big goals are won in bite sized chunks.

Whether it is a race, a career, or a business, staring at the whole distance is paralysing. Focus on the next marker, the next task, the next call.

You can sprint some of the time, but not all of the time.

Strategic bursts only work if you deliberately build in recovery.

Otherwise, burnout is not an "if", it's a "when."

10. Rest, stopping, and re-examining your life

A lot of us only allow ourselves to rest if we can wrap it in a business case.

“I'll come back sharper.”

“More productive.”

Sometimes that's true.

Sometimes it's just the only story we let ourselves believe.

A real reset needs a full stop.

You cannot see your life clearly if you are still half in the inbox and half on the holiday. At times you have to step out completely.

Systems you built to support your life can quietly turn into cages.

Work rhythms. Family rhythms. Routines that once kept you safe.

If you do not check them, you can end up trapped in patterns that no longer fit who you are now.

And that's really it.

As I mentioned at the top, these are just some observations.

Things I've learned, often the hard way.

Even then, they are not necessarily lessons I’ll carry for my entire life.

Three years ago, I probably would have read something like this and seen short-sightedness or weakness. If my ego really took the wheel, I would have called it someone justifying failure by saying success is not important.

It is a sad irony, really. Needing to reach our old version of success before we can finally see it for what it is. And, more importantly, what it isn't.

And in the future, three years from now, I may look back on this and disagree with parts of it, or even all of it.

Because there’s always something blocking your vision. And right now, 2025 as a whole is probably blocking yours as much as it’s blocking mine.

Which is fine.

In all honesty, I think it's kind of the point.

So as we cap off the year and enjoy some downtime with family and friends, most of us will inevitably get to that familiar point where we start thinking about resolutions, and what next year will look like.

This is the only part of this post where I will confidently say I think everyone should do this, or at least do their own version of it.

Because we so often set goals in a vacuum.

We set resolutions based on ideals and comparison and who we think we should be, not on an honest read of the life we are actually living.

So before you lock in anything for next year, carve out an hour or two to sit with your year. You can do any variation of that.

For me, what works is simple:

Open your camera roll.

Start at January 2025.

Then scroll.

You'll see a lot of highlights.

The wins.

They'll probably look similar to your Instagram feed.

But hopefully there are a lot of personal wins in there too.

Wins for you, not the world.

But you'll also see the quiet moments.

The boring Tuesday nights.

The photos you didn't post.

Some of them you'll look at and think, why did I even take this?

It must have been important, in the moment.

And you'll very likely come across the hard moments too.

Screenshots of difficult emails.

Photos of paperwork that represent more weight than you thought you could bear.

The inside of a hospital, a final selfie with someone who was never going to leave with you. Or maybe even long stretches, days or weeks or months, where you took no photos at all.

Then, at the end, ask yourself:

• What was actually good?

• What was hard but necessary?

• What was just hard?

Because the parts you didn't share publicly still shaped the year just as much as the wins did. Sometimes more.

They all counted toward the person who is standing here now.

And they all need to be factored in to however you decide to "rate" yourself on whatever goals you might have set for 2025, and for the goals you set yourself for 2026.

So if you can, try to take that time for yourself somewhere over whatever Christmas looks like for you.

Because the machine will spin back up.

It always does.

There will be more emails, more noise, more demands on your time and attention.

And before that happens, your year deserves the space to be looked back on properly.

Not to rewrite how it started or ended or anything in the middle nor sand it back into a highlight reel.

Just to see it clearly, take what you need from it, and carry those lessons forward.