I have struggled to properly orient myself around what it is I want to accomplish this year. Maybe you have been in the same boat.

You want to look better, but are struggling to latch to a why. You want to develop professionally, but are struggling to understand for what exactly. You want to have better relationships, but are struggling with how to start.

After much thought, I have landed on something I think may be helpful to you. I am casting an umbrella to my year that all goals, ambitions, and pursuits must comfortably fit under. That umbrella is this:

“In 2026, I want to prioritize being the best father and husband I can be as my north star, while also consciously identifying areas and things that will keep my personal and professional development curve pointing up and to the right.”

I want to be a great dad, first and foremost. But I am also not ready to let my foot off the gas with fitness, nor with my career. And I believe that with focused, intentional work, I can find a happy medium that allows me to be successful in all 3 buckets. But the umbrella is that nothing I pursue can conflict with being the best dad I can be.

And here’s the announcement for the Misogi:

In August, I will be taking part in my first “Last Man’s Standing” race. 4.1 miles, every hour. How much time left in the hour you have left when you finish is what you get to rest. And you run until there is one person left on the course.

A race with no finish lines scares the shit out of me, which is why we have to go see what it’s all about. We’ll share what we find along the way.

A recent post from Chris Williamson broke down something I have always felt but rarely define clearly - the difference between motivation, discipline, and obsession, and why obsession is the stage where transformation becomes effortless.

Chris lays it out this way:

The message isn’t that motivation or discipline are “bad” - they’re necessary early on. But they’re expensive and run on finite sources of fuel. Discipline burns energy, and motivation disappears when life gets heavy and things fill our schedules. Obsession, on the other hand, is discipline and motivation embedded. It’s friction inverted, the resistance doesn’t need to be fought anymore because the behavior is now part of who you are.

I love this idea and think it’s beautifully laid out in the post, but I have one clarifying angle to add that resonates deeply with my own journey. It’s a key differentiator because I believe at certain points of your journey, you need to employ all three of these fuel sources to engrain the behavior deep enough where obsession can be pulled from.

When I first decided to get in shape, I was 245 pounds. I was motivated! I wanted something different, something better. Motivation got me to the gym that first day, and that first week. But motivation alone didn’t keep me going when life got busy, or when I was tired, or when I didn’t feel like training. That’s when I leaned into discipline and the messaging from guys like Jocko Willink and David Goggins I relied on so heavily at the time. Showing up whether I felt like it or not, designing routines that made it hard not to follow through. I accepted the friction. For a long time, that’s what it took.

But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

The gym wasn’t something I had to do anymore, it became something I couldn’t not do. I didn’t fight myself to go; I simply went. The routine became automatic. Eating clean wasn’t a daily battle, it became the default. I felt much worse when I DIDN'T train or eat well. The behaviors that once required willpower and external motivation became part of my identity: I am someone who cares about how I feel, how I perform, and how I look - and the person you become through all three of those pursuits.

This idea may seem far fetched to someone who is on the front side looking in on their journey. You might think this end point is not one that is in their cards, but as someone who has been there, I can confidently say that now, when I wake up my first thought isn’t “Should I go to the gym?” - it’s “When am I going?” And that’s not discipline. At least not in it’s true form. That’s not motivation. That’s what I think Chris is talking about with obsession. And as Chris points out, obsession isn’t something to suppress or moderate, it’s the state where work stops feeling like work and starts feeling like who you are.

This isn’t about perfection or burning out. It’s about automating the behaviors that matter most by connecting them not just to an outcome, but to the kind of person you want to become. Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you consistent. Obsession transforms you.

As you transition into February and start to feel a disconnect from the goals you set just a month ago, reframe your mindset around them and employ a plan to transition through these three phases. Get motivated. You want that end result. Watch the Youtubes. Draw the dream board. Use discipline to get up and go do it. Every day. You don’t miss. You show up, and continue to show up. Afford yourself the opportunity to show up so many times in a row that you wake up one day and the person you’ve become no longer needs to pep talk themselves to taking action.

I know everyone isn’t like me and doesn’t find the art in bodybuilding and the meat head training space. If you yourself have been intimidated by bodybuilders’ training philosophy (endless gym hours and high-rep circuits) then this week’s Huberman Lab episode with 6-time Mr. Olympia legend Dorian Yates offers a relieving alternative and some clarity. Yates is a pioneer of a high-intensity, low-volume approach that helped him dominate bodybuilding in the ’90s (while everyone else was beating themselves up twice a day), and it translates surprisingly well to everyday fitness goals.

Here are 4 actionable principles from the episode that anyone can start using this week:

1- Train Hard — But Train Less Often

Yates flipped the old “more is better” thinking on its head. I’ll admit this is something I am going to challenge myself on. Instead of daily gym marathons, he advocates just 2–3 focused weight sessions per week, each about 45–60 minutes long. The emphasis: quality over quantity. This means you spend your time actually working, not scrolling between sets.

Pick 2–3 non-consecutive days each week. Commit to being present and intentional, and make sure you are giving 100% on 3 days instead of 5 days of half-ass effort.

2- Go to True Failure on Key Sets

True failure is often a foreign concept to most in the gym. One of the most talked-about principles Yates champions is training to true muscular failure on key movements. That means you feel the burn, push hard, and reach the point where you can’t complete another rep with good form. That fatigue signal tells your body to adapt (i.e., get stronger or build muscle). His philosophy revolves around truly failing out the muscle, and then giving it proper time to recover, grow, and train to fail yet again.

After a proper warm-up, perform one or two working sets per exercise, pushing to controlled failure. For beginners, keep movements simple (leg press, smith machine bench press, lat pulldowns, etc.) and focus on form first, failure second.

3 - Time-Efficient Cardio: The 6-Minute Protocol

Yates isn’t about long, slow sessions either. The strategy he highlights resembles high-intensity interval training (HIIT):

Whether on a bike, rower, treadmill, or outside, this protocol boosts cardiovascular health and metabolic fitness in a fraction of the time. If you truly go 100% for these 20 seconds, you won’t want to do a 4th round.

4- Support Training with Movement, Sleep & Nutrition

Yates doesn’t teach extreme dieting or gym obsession, he underscores that growth happens outside the gym. Your body recovers while you sleep, and it responds to nutrient quality and daily movement habits. Think of lifting as the stimulus, not the whole story.

Prioritize 7–9 hours of sleep each night. Eat protein-rich meals with veggies and whole carbs. Keep daily steps up - walking, standing, playing with kids - all add to health.

I hope this is encouraging to someone reading wanting to start the gym. You don’t need to spend hours in the gym to see progress. When you train intensely, recover smartly, and integrate smart habits into your routine, big wins are possible, even on a busy schedule. Dorian’s methods strip fitness down to what matters most: effortful focus, strategic rest, and consistency. Give the episode a listen this week

Every year I have a lingering temptation to find something new - a new framework, a new philosophy, a new voice that promises a clear path to success and growth. And every year, I find myself coming back to the same place.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

If Stoicism had a foundation, this is it. Not a manifesto. Not a how-to guide. But a private journal written by a Roman Emperor nearly 2,000 years ago. A man with absolute power, immense responsibility, and constant pressure, reminding himself how to live well.

The fact that his thoughts and ideas are still relevant alone continues to pull me back. This book was written in a world with no phones, no email, no social media, no modern distractions - yet somehow it speaks directly to the problems we wrestle with today: anxiety, ego, ambition, comparison, frustration, purpose.

I have read a lot of books in my life from front to back and then moved on - to never revisit them again. Meditations (and hence Ryan Holiday’s work), has been a stable force of coming on and off the shelf. I like to force myself to study it throughout the year. A few pages at a time. Sometimes a single passage. It’s not a book you “finish”, it’s a book you return to when life speeds up and your thinking gets sloppy.

Marcus wrote reminders like this for himself:

That sentence alone is enough to recalibrate an entire week. Or this one:

As I look at 2026, I’ve made a deliberate decision - Stoicism will be the center of my personal development. Not because it’s a cool trendy word, but because it works. It always has. And everything I’ve found valuable in modern personal growth eventually traces back here.

Ryan Holiday’s work has played a massive role in this for me. His books don’t reinvent Stoicism, they translate it. They point back to Meditations, to Epictetus, to Seneca. And rather than chasing the next new idea, I’m choosing depth into an old one. Fewer inputs. More repetition. More application.

Instead of asking “What else is out there?” I’m asking “What actually changes how I behave?” Meditations has always been a reliable source here.

Marcus understood thousands of years ago before Tony Robbins and John Maxwell that progress doesn’t come from novelty. It comes from practice:

“If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.”

Simple. Demanding. Timeless.

Meditations is also really short. A challenging but accessible read. You don’t need to be a philosopher to read it, you just need to be willing to sit with uncomfortable truths about yourself. That’s why I think it belongs on more nightstands than productivity books ever will.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, scattered, or pulled in too many directions, this could be a great book for you to start with.

The fundamental truth is that though our world and the types of challenges we face have evolved, we as humans face the same moral dilemmas that our ancestors many years ago. And if they survived them - and survived despite them - why should we not pull from their timeless wisdom?