What a Weird Year
Before 2025 ends, I wanted to tell you thank you for being there. Thank you for listening. Thank you for understanding. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for everythiiiiiiiiing.
On Becoming Smaller
Anthony Bourdain once wrote;
“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realise the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realise how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough - to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, such as it is, means realising how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”
I’ve thought about this a lot this year. Two more stamps in the passport - Vietnam and India, and spent a lot of time driving in Australia, and the paradox becomes clearer. The world doesn’t shrink when you explore it. You do. And that’s not a bad thing.
On Letting Go (Or Not)
This year, I realised I have a tough time letting go of people I care about.
There’s no neat lesson here. No three-step framework. Just the uncomfortable truth that caring deeply makes everything else harder. The goodbyes linger longer. The what-ifs stack up higher. The people who matter continue to matter, even when geography or circumstance suggests they shouldn’t.
I’m still working on this one.
On Not Being Alone
For the first time in my professional life, I worked alongside a colleague. Not just shared office space or traded emails, but actual daily mentoring, collaboration, the whole thing.
Turns out the lone wolf thing I’d perfected over the years wasn’t the ceiling. It was just comfortable.
The daily push, the shared wins, the realisation that “what could be accomplished together” wasn’t just motivational poster nonsense - it rewired how I think about work. About capacity. About what’s possible when you stop treating collaboration like a weakness.
On Operating at 60%
Here’s what I know: if I managed what I managed this year, feeling the way I felt, running at maybe 60% capacity on the good days, then god help the world if I get back to full strength.
I wouldn’t bet against me.
That’s not bravado. It’s pattern recognition. It’s looking at the deals closed, the countries visited, the lessons learned, the relationships navigated - all while carrying weight that would’ve flattened the younger version of me - and thinking: “Alright then. What happens when this actually gets easy?”
On Being SINK
Single Income, No Kids.
The acronym makes it sound like a demographic category or a tax bracket. Really, it’s just shorthand for “designed my life on purpose and it looks different than yours.”
And life is good.
Not perfect. Not without the challenging bits mentioned above. But good in the way that matters - the freedom to say yes to India, to build something meaningful at work, to sit with the hard stuff without needing to have it solved by year-end.
On 2026
If I’m able to take from all of the past lessons learned, I feel like 2026 is going to be the best one yet.
Life is a compounding beast. The longer you stay in the game, the greater the returns. You’ve just got to stick it through the messy middle, the tough quarters, the days when 60% feels generous.
Every conversation that went sideways taught me how to communicate better. Every deal that stalled taught me where to apply pressure. Every goodbye that hurt taught me what actually matters. Every collaboration showed me what leverage really looks like.
The passport’s getting fuller. The network’s getting stronger. The clarity’s getting sharper.
New trips on the radar. New capacity coming online. Same commitment to the people who stuck around through this weird year.
The world’s bigger than I thought. I’m smaller than I thought. The work matters more than I thought. The returns are compounding. 2026 is going to be something special.
NB.