2025: Year in Review

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As 2025 comes to a close, I'm looking back on how the year went. Writing these reflection-style posts is sort of a newish thing for me, but I'd like to do them more often. 2025 was an especially interesting year for me, so it's worth taking stock of what worked well and what I'd like to improve in 2026.

tl;dr

The one-sentence summary of 2025 for me was that it was a year of building great and sustainable routines/systems.

I started waking up early every morning, reading my Bible, and doing 6x/week workouts every week. At the start of fall, I also added in daily calorie and macro tracking. Most importantly, I've been able to maintain all of the above habits since starting them.

It was also a very challenging year along a number of dimensions, perhaps most notably in regard to parenting. This year has been the hardest one yet, but it has also forced me to confront and work on my lack of patience and my selfish tendencies.

A year of building and keeping habits

There were two key tactics that resulted in me being able to build and consistently maintain routines/systems long-term:

  1. Start tiny
  2. Identify my keystone habit

Tactic 1: Start tiny

In January of 2025, I was just coming off of reading BJ Fogg's wonderful book, Tiny Habits. I had previously read Atomic Habits (another great book) and have generally been aware of the need to focus on consistency over intensity for a while, now. I even wrote about it back in 2019. But as the saying goes, we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. Tiny Habits contains a ton of really solid and tactical advice but it was the emphasis on starting tiny and still counting it as a win that led to this year's success.

And when I say tiny, I mean REALLY TINY.

You're going to have to double down on "tiny," because it's almost certainly way smaller than you think. Instead of setting the bar at going on a 5-minute run, try considering it a win if you get dressed in running gear, step outside, and do some stretches.

For me, the key unlock here was when the following gelled together:

  • The bar for success must be so low that it would be ridiculous to not be able to achieve success on any given day.
  • Stick to the bar! Some days you're only going to hit the bare minimum for success, and that's okay. Give yourself grace in being able to still call it a win.

For me, that last bullet point is where the rubber meets the road. I have failed so many times in the past by failing to stick to my agreement about what constitutes a "win". I need to continually remind myself that the bare minimum still counts. I'm constantly fighting my inner naysayer: "If all you ever do is just the bare minimum, it'll never make a difference." That statement is true, but it's also not the point. The point is to build consistency at all costs and let intensity flow out of it. Intensity grows much more naturally out of the healthy soil of consistency.

Tactic 2: Identify my keystone habit

My typical approach in the past has been to try to force the discipline to do the habit itself. Discipline is of course important, but trying to grind directly on the thing itself is low leverage work. You get one output per one input. Successfully trying really hard to get yourself to do a workout earns you a single completed workout. Focusing on setting up the right conditions for a win, on the other hand, is high leverage work. Cleaning up and optimizing my home gym layout makes every workout so much easier. Yes, you still need discipline when it comes time to execute the habit, but you need a whole lot less of it when you curate favorable conditions. And when it comes to building good routines, the biggest leverage comes from identifying and focusing on your keystone habit before anything else.

What is a keystone habit? It's the ONE habit that, when successful, makes every other habit dramatically easier. For me (and probably many others) my keystone habit is sleep. When I am well-rested, I think better, I make better decisions, I'm more motivated, and I'm much less prone to frustration or seeking escapist activities.

Tying it all together

My entire "good habits" journey began in January 2025 when my desire to get better sleep aligned with my purchase of a fancy coffee machine. Knowing that a great cup of coffee would be waiting for me when I woke up was a huge motivator, and it created very favorable conditions for waking up early.

Having just finished reading Tiny Habits, I decided that I was going to start by simply going to bed at 11 AM and waking up at 7 AM every morning. No other obligations. The win was simply to be awake at 7 AM, and the time was mine to do anything I wanted to do with it.

I started to really enjoy my 30-ish minute routine of coffee and silence before my kids and wife got out of bed, and before long I found myself wanting to get up earlier and earlier. I gradually started moving the time back week after week until eventually I was waking up at 6:00 AM every morning.

At this point I was regularly getting good sleep, and regularly starting the day off with calm, meditative time to myself. This created space to start doing the things I wanted to do. I started journaling regularly again, as well as reading the Bible. With the newfound energy from good sleep and a great morning routine, I found that the mental barrier to working out was much lower. I was rested and felt confident and capable from the other wins that were stacking up, so I started doing small workouts in the afternoons. After a few weeks of those, I started to feel really great both physically and emotionally. As both working out and waking up early became routine, I started to move workouts to the mornings and discovered that I loved it.

What I liked about the year

Learning on the side

In 2025, I was much more intentional about learning on the side. My main focus this year has been around LLMs and mathematics in general. The main reason is that I was fairly uneasy about how little I knew about LLMs under the hood. More generally, I had never taken the time to learn about neural networks.

I started early in the year by laying a foundation of simply understanding neural networks. There are too many resources to remember, but two that stand out are:

After feeling comfortable with how a Neural Network actually works, I then moved on to learning about how an LLM (specifically a GPT) works. A couple of great resources on this front were:

I definitely learn best through hands-on experimentation and actually doing something, and Sebastian's book has been great for that. More generally, I've also been brushing up on math from my college days. Just generally searching out resources around calculus and linear algebra, and making sure to periodically do a Google search for homework-style questions so that I can prove to my self I'm actually understanding and learning the material.

Working on side projects

I've been much more active on side projects in 2025. A big reason for that is the rise of LLM-assisted coding and agentic tools like Claude Code. I still do much of the actual coding—mostly because that's what I enjoy, but partially because LLMs just aren't able to reliably get from 80% to 100%. But LLMs are so good at helping me get past roadblocks, overcoming the "blank page", and just generally taking bullshit work off my plate.

I work at a small startup and I'm a father of 2 young children. My time for side projects is extremely limited. If I have 60 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to sit down with a side project, I don't want to waste it on bullshit work that takes time away from the fun stuff.

Most of the side projects I've worked on are in private GitHub repos, but I want to change that in 2026 and work more in the open. I did start doing this back in September by releasing my binwheels-neovim side project. It's not really a side project, but I also rebuilt my Neovim configuration from scratch starting in August, and made that public.

What I want to improve in 2026

Goal 1: Delete bullshit

This goal is so broad that it's almost meaningless, except for the fact that it's a really visceral way to remind myself to stop allowing things that I have control over to distract me from the things that are most important to me in life. It's actually less of a goal and more of a prompt to continually ask myself, "is this bullshit?"

The beauty of "Delete bullshit" is that it's so broad that I can apply it to basically everything: Situations, mindsets, physical possessions, etc.

Actually defining bullshit is also a little nebulous, but the good (bad?) news is that there's so much low-hanging fruit that I don't need to worry about a precise definition right now. Does a particular situation fill me with dread in the pit of my stomach? Is my sense of joy crushed by an activity I regularly find myself having to do? Is a particular thing keeping me from being able to enjoy something I have already been blessed with in life?

These are all easy candidates for being deleted.

Goal 2: Stop letting fear make my decisions

This is almost embarrassing to admit at age 43, but despite the fact that I am an adult who is doing adult things, I still make too many decisions based out of fear. Fear of what other people will think of me. Fear of being criticized or disliked. Fear of stupid things like going to the doctor. In a lot of ways, I sort of feel like an 8 year old who has gotten really good at cosplaying an adult.

I know this basically amounts to saying "stop it", so in the spirit of getting tactical, I've started making a list of the things that I find myself avoiding, managing, running from, or otherwise feeling like I'm walking on glass about. Each week in 2026 I'll pick the top item on that list that I'm most afraid of and confront it, whatever that means. Maybe the list will end up empty and maybe it won't, but I'll at least I'll be exercising my muscles of facing down my fears.

I mentioned this above, but I think a concrete output of working on this goal will involve putting myself out in public more, whether that's blog posts, public side projects, or something else entirely.

Goal 3: Dial up the quality of my habits

I'd like to build on the foundation of consistency that I built in 2025 and becoming more regular/predictable with the quality of my efforts. Reducing the number of bare-minimum days. Dialing up the quality of my diet. Note that this is an optimization stage that comes after goals 1 and 2, which focus on removing things that I don't want in my life. There's no sense in optimizing something that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Closing thoughts

The general theme of what I'm looking for in 2026 is something to the effect of say "no" to most things so I can say "yes"to a handful of the best things. One thing I'm still noodling on is that I'd like to engage more in communities related to the few things I lean into. I'd like to build more human connection with others on the same path as me. I'm still figuring out exactly what that looks like, so stay tuned for more.

This was a long-winded post, so if you've made it this far, know that I genuinely appreciate you! Best wishes for a wonderful 2026.

#self