The Christmas season is a perfect metaphor for the evolution of life we experience. What begins as an orbiting around presents and gifts quickly transitions into a focus on time and experiences.

As you’ve gotten older, you start noticing the moments between the moments. The conversations that linger on. The laughter from another room. The quiet joy of watching the next generation experience the same wonder you once did, now through a different lens.

It’s not unlike so many things in life. Early on, we chase self-centered outcomes. Later, we realize the real value was always in the experience, the people, the presence. The reason for the season doesn’t disappear, it evolves.

This week is an invitation to lean into that evolution. To be fully here. To put the phone down, pull the chair closer, and resist the urge to rush through what you’ll someday wish you could relive.

Time with the people who matter is the real gift. And it’s one we never get back.

If I’ve learned anything through self-experimentation and research on habits it’s this -most people don’t fail at goals because they’re lazy or undisciplined. They (I) fail because they’re (I’m) chasing the wrong things.

We live in a world that’s very good at handing us goals - make more money, lose 20 pounds, get promoted, run a faster race, build a bigger business. None of these are bad goals. I’ve set my own in lock-step with all of the above previously. The problem is how often we adopt these goals and ambitions without asking a more uncomfortable question first:

Why does this matter to me?

When you skip that step, what I have found is the goal-setting breaks in two predictable ways.

First: You achieve the goal and feel… nothing. You hit the number, cross the finish line, get the title, and the satisfaction evaporates faster than expected. That’s not because you’re broken or ungrateful. It’s because the goal never connected to who you are or what you actually value. It was borrowed motivation. And so to re-up that motivation tank, you have to quickly realign your sights on that next, more ambitious goal.

Second: You abandon the goal halfway through. Not because you “lost discipline,” but because, on some level, the goal conflicts with what you want your life to look like. Your values quietly pull the emergency brake. And then you beat yourself up for quitting something you never truly wanted.

Both problems come from the same root cause - setting goals before clarifying values.

I heard it best put from James Clear:

“Goals are outcomes. Values are directions. Outcomes are temporary. Directions shape your life.”

When you reverse the order - values first, goals second - everything gets cleaner. The logic starts to make more sense. Goals stop being arbitrary targets and start becoming expressions of identity, or at least the identity you wish to attain some day.

I’ve been thinking about this (and have probably over-written about it at this point) a lot as we head into 2026. My life is about to take a spin on the merry-go-round with my son’s birth (Maybe you have a significant change coming too), and I’m very cognizant that I want to make sure that everything I pursue in the new year aligns with what I want my life to look like at home, while also not letting the foot off the gas on making sure I am filling my cup with meaningful pursuits and growth.

For me, the simplest place to start is to define values across a few core life domains, to ensure we’re considering what total fulfillment looks like to us. Some examples:

Health: “Taking care of my body and mind so I can continue to show up in meaningful ways for the people and pursuits I care about. To feel confident in my body and to feel challenged by my mind.” This reframes health goals from aesthetics or punishment into longevity and capability.

Craft: “Pursuing excellence in a few projects and activities that matter to me.” This helps me stop chasing everything and start going deep where it counts.

Family: “Being there for my kids and my partner so consistently that when I have to miss something, it is a recognizable anomaly” Suddenly, career and fitness goals must coexist with presence, not compete with it.

Community: “Showing up for the important people in my life at a volume that fulfills me and encourages growth in the relationship.” This prevents professional success from quietly isolating myself.

Truth: “Living with integrity, telling it how it is, and being consistently analytical and questioning of why I do the things I do.” This one filters decisions fast. If a goal requires constant self-betrayal, it’s not aligned.

Once values are clear, goal-setting becomes simpler, and harder in the right way.

You don’t ask, “What should I aim for?” You ask, “What goals would allow me to honor this value right now?”

The right goals feel grounded. They demand effort, but they don’t require you to become someone you don’t respect. They’re harder to abandon because quitting them would mean walking away from your own standards, not just a number on a scale or title on a business card.

As you set your ambitions for the new year, take the time to do this exercise for yourself. Change the value buckets if you’d like, but once finished, use these as guiding principles that allow you to have more honest conversations with yourself.

Why do you want to lose the weight? What would that change do for your life, your confidence, your ability to show up later in life?

Why do you feel stagnant at work? Is it a job problem or a mentality problem? Would seeking other options fix the root issue, or cause more problems to arise?

You say your family is the most important thing to you - are the professional and personal ambitions you’re setting for yourself saying the same message?

Throughout this year I have gone back and forth playing with improving my prompting and usage of the many AI tools out there. The more I use them, the more applications I find. I also find that as I continue to spend time in these platforms, the fears of some quick AI future takeover calm themselves a bit. These tools are great, and pack a lot of every day practical application to be more efficient in a number of realms. They still remain much closer to a souped-up search engine than the star of The Terminator.

In my experience chatting with colleagues in friends, I find most people who aren’t using AI aren’t doing so for the same reasons some people stay out of commercial gyms - they don’t know where to start.

Most people don’t get great results from AI because they begin asking vague questions. For the practice of this section below, a novice would ask: “Give me a workout plan” or “Tell me how to eat better”, producing generic answers, not much better than a quick Google would give. The power comes from learning how to prompt with intention, and utilizing tools to help you do so.

As you consider your fitness and nutrition goals this year, I want to encourage you to recruit the help of your AI tool of choice. If you follow some basic guidelines and use this tool I have linked below, I think you will be amazed at the results. Here are some of the fundamentals of an effective fitness or nutrition prompt I have lined out from playing with the prompting myself:

Here’s an example of a well-crafted prompt:

“I’m a 35-year-old male who trains 4 days per week in a commercial gym. My goal is to lose 15 pounds over 12 weeks while maintaining strength. I prefer compound lifts, have no injuries, and can train 60 minutes per session. Can you create a 4-day split with weekly progression and basic nutrition guidelines?”

That single prompt will outperform 90% of fitness content online, because it’s aligned with what you are looking to get out of the plan, not the masses.

Here’s where a lot of people still get stuck - knowing how to write prompts like that consistently. This is where PromptCowboy quietly becomes useful.

PromptCowboy doesn’t replace ChatGPT, it simply helps you use it better. Think of it as training wheels for prompt quality. You start with a rough idea (“I want a workout plan”), and it helps refine that into a clear, structured prompt by guiding you to add missing context, clarify constraints, and ask for usable outputs. It will produce a better prompt for you, that can then be further refined by answering qualifying questions specific to what you have requested of it.

For novice users, this removes the intimidation of “doing AI wrong.” For experienced users, it saves time and sharpens results. It also shows you the structure of an A+ prompt, so after a few exposures, you can begin to produce better prompts on your own, from the start.

Take this year as a challenge to yourself to get creative with this. Use this for your exercise routine. Have it make your meal plan for you. Use it for an accountability partner. Ask it questions about things you are struggling with in the gym.

When I visited the Painted Porch bookstore a few weeks back, I picked up 9 books based on some of Ryan Holiday’s favorite reads. Rapidly approaching fatherhood, one of those titles was Range (Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World) by David Epstein, which Ryan had detailed as a parenting book disguised as personal development, and that framing intrigued me.

I just finished this book this week, and now, a couple weeks out from fatherhood, the core concept certainly hits differently and has got my wheels spinning on how to effectively enter this stage of life and raising successful children.

The core takeaway I keep coming back to is this - early specialization is overrated, and broad exposure builds better long-term success.

Epstein shows - across sports, careers, music, and science - that many top performers didn’t start out hyper-focused. They sampled widely. They tried things. They were “behind” early… and better off later.

From my observation, that runs directly against modern parenting culture.

We feel pressure to optimize early. Pick the sport. Pick the lane. Get the reps. Don’t fall behind. But Range makes a strong case that forcing narrow paths too soon can limit adaptability, creativity, and intrinsic motivation.

What matters more than early dominance is learning how to learn.

As a soon-to-be dad, this reframes a lot for me.

Instead of asking, “What should my kid be best at?” I want to ask, “What environments help my kid explore, struggle, and self-correct?”

Practically, that means a few things I’m taking from the book to commit to (understanding I am scoping this out on the front end of being a dad):

First - exposure over optimization. Sports, music, books, outdoor play, building things, breaking things. Not to create résumés, but to create reference points. Skills stack later when curiosity leads.

Second - effort and reflection over outcomes. Epstein’s research shows that people who learn slowly, but deeply, often outperform early stars long-term. We should care less about winning at age 9 and more about learning how to practice, adapt, and persist.

Third - resisting comparison. One of the most damaging things for kids is being measured against a rigid timeline. Range reinforces that development is nonlinear, and that’s not a bug, it’s the feature.

Epstein consistently reinforces in the book that this doesn’t mean no structure. It means flexible structure. Guidance without confinement. Support without scripting the future.

The irony is that this approach requires more patience from parents, not less. You have to tolerate uncertainty. You have to trust that breadth now can become depth later. As I get ready to become a father, that’s the challenge I’m sitting with. Really enjoyed this read for any other parents out there.