Every other month or so I like to sprinkle in a long form piece about one specific idea or general thought I am having. This is one of those weeks.

I’ve been thinking diligently about my ambitions for the year and how I am tracking towards them. Maybe you’ve been doing the same.

Maybe you’ve been purposefully avoiding that very reflection because you feel like you’ve already lost the plot for the year. You fell off the wagon. Life got busy. A missed day turned into a missed week.

Or maybe you’re finally ahead of pace this year. Maybe you just need to continue the momentum.

Regardless, we are approaching the end of Q1 for 2026, and now is a better time than ever to get real, and level-set with each other and ourselves about where we’re headed and what we need to change to get there. So let’s do just that.

This January probably finally felt serious. It probably felt like the year that everything was finally going to change. You were finally going to take action on those desires you have harbored for your life for years now.

You probably wrote a few things down somewhere. A notebook, a notes app, maybe a quiet promise to yourself while the year was still brand new.

You meant it when you wrote it. And deep down you still do. But it’s the middle of March now. And if you’re one of the 98%, some of that momentum has slipped.

Not dramatically. There was no big moment where you decided to quit. It was subtler than that. A few skipped mornings. A few weeks that life got busy. A few quiet negotiations with yourself that felt like short-term compromises in the moment.

The INFAMOUS: “I’ll get back to it next week.”

Most people follow this exact pattern every year. I am and have been most people. January brings optimism. February begins to demands consistency. And by March, the initial motivation has worn off and the work starts to feel real. Those mornings at the gym start to feel like a job. It’s been two and a half-months - why am I not already in 6 pack shape?!

This is where most people drift.

Not because they’re incapable. Because they were relying on excitement to carry them further than it ever could. It’s the same song and dance every year.

There’s actually a biological reason January feels easy and March feels harder. Dopamine - the brain chemical tied to motivation and anticipation - spikes when something is new. A fresh year, a new goal, a clean slate. But the brain quickly adapts. The novelty fades and dopamine levels settle back to normal. That’s why motivation disappears for most people around this time of year. The ones who keep going aren’t riding motivation anymore, they’re relying on structure.

Today’s Superset is here to provide the good news. The encouraging reality that March isn’t a failure point. It’s certainly not the end of the year either. It’s a diagnostic.

The first quarter of the year shows you which intentions had systems behind them and which ones were just good ideas written down on a cold January morning.

All it takes is a quick peek at the calendar to realize the math still works in your favor. Roughly three quarters of the year remains.

Nine and a half months of ordinary days. Enough time to build serious momentum if you engage again now.

But you are going to have to be real and honest with yourself right now. This week. It’s March 16th. You have two weeks to put your action plan together for the remaining three quarters of the year. The result of this reflection will ultimately require a small shift in how you think about goals. Not grand reinvention. Just clearer frameworks and a willingness to start again without beating yourself up.

It’s my opinion that in order to truly be successful with any pursuit in life, you have to have two things - (1) a system that is broken down to the daily actions that are non-negotiable to achieve them, and (2) a deeply rooted reason for why you want to accomplish this in the first place.

People fail all the time at getting in shape because they say s*** like “I want to look good in my swimsuit this summer.” Or they see a bunch of fit people in their Instagram feed and want the same for themselves. This is a physique example of surface level ambitions for a goal, but the key component of it is that reasoning like this is simply not enough.

Dig deeper.

You want confidence. The type of confidence that you can walk through the bathroom in your house without a shirt on and not have to shy away from your reflection in the mirror. You want energy. The energy to play with your kids. The energy to produce results at work without tiring out. You want the ability to regulate your emotions better, because you’re not slogged down from being out of shape. You want that confidence from your bathroom to permeate into other areas of your life. You want to start feeling like you’re someone who brings the fight, not just feels like they’re constantly keeping up.

Extrapolate those reasons out for your specific goal or ambition. Get granular. Because the systems that follow won’t matter if you don’t.

Got this done? Great. Now to the tactical meat and bones that are going to ensure the next 9 months are better than the first, regardless if you are ahead or restarting all together.

Most people organize their goals around results, and this is ultimately why they fail.

Lose 20 pounds - Read 20 books - Run a marathon.

Those are outcomes. Outcomes are useful, but they’re terrible daily motivators.

James Clear makes a simple point in Atomic Habits - “lasting behavior change starts with identity.”

Instead of asking what you want to achieve, ask:

What type of person achieves that outcome naturally?

Someone who runs consistently doesn’t wake up every day thinking about the marathon. They see themselves as a runner, and their behavior reflects it.

The same thing happened with my own running.

At first it was a program. A schedule. Something I was trying to stick to. Something I also failed at multiple times seeing through before succeeding. Eventually it became simpler than that. Running was just part of the week, like brushing my teeth or making coffee.

The identity changed first and the mileage followed.

Reading works the same way. Writing a weekly newsletter has forced me to become someone who reads even more constantly. Not occasionally, not when I feel like it. If I want to have something meaningful to say each week, reading isn’t optional. It’s part of the system.

So instead of trying to restart ten goals at once, try something smaller this week.

Pick one identity you want to reinforce:

Then cast a daily vote for that identity. Ten minutes. Ten pages. A short workout. The action can be small. The repetition is what matters. Identity compounds.

Remember - you can afford to miss a day. But two misses in a row is no longer a miss. It’s the start of a new habit. One that is working against you, not for you.

In my experience, most failed goals share the same structural problem. People try to insert brand new behaviors into an already crowded life. That rarely lasts.

A better approach is habit stacking.

The idea is simple. Attach a new habit to something that already happens every day.

Morning coffee becomes the cue to read five pages. Brushing your teeth becomes the cue to do ten minutes of mobility. Getting home from work becomes the cue to write, study, or train. The existing routine becomes the trigger.

Andrew Huberman often explains that the brain responds strongly to consistent cues. When an action is paired with a predictable event, it becomes easier to execute because the brain no longer treats it as a fresh decision every day. The cue handles that.

Why did you brush your teeth when you got up this morning? Why did you put your dish in the sink when you were done eating?

If you’re trying to rebuild momentum this quarter, resist the temptation to overhaul everything. Choose one habit and anchor it to an existing part of your day.

If you are trying to get fit, I would start with identifying an easy part of your day - maybe it’s a specific action on Sunday, where you can get ahead of at least the first few days of your week with your meal planning or prepping. Starting the week knowing you are set up for success with the diet will make it easier to pair with doubling down on getting after it in the gym. Then the cue for losing weight simply becomes pulling the healthy meal out of the fridge.

One of the most clarifying questions you can ask yourself is also one of the simplest:

“Five years from now, what would genuinely bother you if you never pursued it?”

Sahil Bloom calls this the five-year deathbed test. The Stoics used similar thinking. By imagining the end of life, they clarified what actually mattered during it.

When you break it down, most procrastination isn’t about time, it’s about hesitation.

Starting something new means accepting uncertainty. You might fail. You might look foolish. You might discover the work is harder than you expected. But regret tends to weigh far more than those risks.

Try this exercise tonight.

Write down three things that would genuinely bother you if you ignored them for the next five years.

How would you feel in five years if you were in the same or worse shape? How would you feel if your financial situation hadn’t improved. How would your relationship look like if it didn’t get better from where it is today?

This extended lens makes the short term micro-actions pale in comparison to the downside of missing out on the macro version of who you really want to be.