New Year Resolutions... Not
I stopped making New Year’s resolutions a few years ago. Why? Because they’re usually a trap. They’re binary - you either do them, or you fail by January 15th and hate yourself until March before forgetting about them completely. They put unnecessary pressure on a system (me) that is already operating under high load.
But I do miss the feeling of a fresh start. So this year, I’m rebranding. No resolutions. Just challenges. A challenge is something you wrestle with; it’s active, it’s messy, and allowed to be difficult.
Here are the three challenges I’m throwing at myself this year.
Challenge 1: Be Positive
I think the world has gone nuts. I thought COVID would be the wildest event that I'd live through but boy was I wrong. The news, the economy, the society, the general vibe right now - it’s heavy. It’s easy to spiral because, biologically, we are wired for it. Psychologists call it the Negativity Bias. Our brains register negative stimuli about three times more intensely than positive ones. We are evolutionarily designed to spot the lion in the grass, not admire the sunset.
So, being positive isn't just "having a nice attitude"; it’s actually a fight against my own biology.
I’m borrowing a concept here called "Opposite Action." It’s a technique where, if your emotion is telling you to do one thing (fear, despair, hide, get angry), you deliberately do the exact opposite. If my brain tells me "everything is broken," I am challenging myself to find the one thing that’s working. I am not saying that I am going to ignore reality and neither I am promoting toxic positivity. It’s about refusing to let the negativity be the only data point I collect.
Challenge 2: Create > Consume
Usually, I have been pretty good at creating more and consuming less but I've noticed a reversal of this pattern in the last few years so this year I am challenging myself to create more than I consume. Don't get me wrong, I love consuming! My go to are video games, binge watching a good TV show, scrolling through Reddit and entering weird and obscure rabbit holes of information that I'll probably never use.
But, what I've noticed is that I am doing more of the above and less of things like writing (part of the reason I started writing this blog), drawing and painting (used to do a lot of this and in a previous life was good at it), reading (technically consumption, but I’m giving it a free pass because unlike doom-scrolling, it actually requires my brain to turn on) and other things I loved doing / creating.
So this year, I want to return to do a factory reset so to speak.
As part of this challenge, I am working on some professional projects which I'll be ready to reveal soon but I also mean the small things.
Cooking fresh meals, picking up a pencil and just doodling for a bit, going to the gym (literally creating muscle fibre, if we want to get technical), writing random blogs and journaling - there's so much to choose from, its endless.
Challenge 3: Just "Be"
This is the hardest one for me.
Since 2007, I've just been running. Running to the uni, running around at work trying to do my best, running a business and teams, running towards an exit, running around doing things so I can build a future that I want and forgetting to enjoy the present while doing so. Even though my life has been anything but normal, I feel like it has been incredibly prescriptive, following a script written by society and standards.
I have a great group of people around me, and I’m not unhappy, but I’m often not here. I often find myself in the future or in the past but not in the present - something I am working on but its a work in progress.
So the challenge is to stop and just be. To sit in a moment without trying to optimize, strategize, monetize and so on. It sounds wishy-washy and feels counter-productive and inefficient. But that’s the point. I need to figure out who I am when I’m not doing something useful.
That's it. That's my list of challenges for 2026 and I am looking at them as mindset shift. If I fail one day, I haven't "broken" a resolution; I’ve just found a particularly hard level in the game. And I’m okay with that.
Let’s see how it goes.
A view of the Sydney harbour on January 1, 2026. I quite enjoyed the mystic nature of this view and thought about what crazy (good and bad) moments this new year will bring.
