'Tis the Season

YouTube videos titled "How to Reinvent Your Life in 4 Months." LinkedIn carousels giving you 8 easy steps to be less distracted and more productive. Content creators offering a "New Year, New You" course. The email with the attached annual reflection template to help unlock your potential in 2026. It's all unintentionally but viciously timed at the end of a six-week long holiday season when nobody can stick to a diet, workout regimen, or work schedule. We are all fried and frazzled.

'Tis the season to feel like I've lost control. Reinventing my life over the next four months sounds like exactly what I need.

I feel like Odysseus and the sirens. Someone needs to tie me to a mast before I sign up for another course or time block off another afternoon for an annual planning session.

I'm not opposed to New Years resolutions or using January 1 to start fresh. Research shows that new initiatives have the highest chance of success when started at the beginning of a time period, whether a fresh week, month, or year. I avoid specific resolutions, but I like to have themes for the year. (This year is Getting fit in '26. Corny, I know, but More zzzzs in '23 helped me learn to sleep. I plan to take the same approach to fitness this year: experiment, spend a little cash where it makes sense, and give myself the space to learn what works for me.)

But what I've found is that the four-month reinvention, the LinkedIn carousel, the online course, the reflection template—none of it solves the problem. Despite that shelf of self-help books and Google Drive stuffed with neglected online courses, my only real progress has ever come in those (fleeting) moments when I realize I don't need to make any changes.

So, in this time of constant bombardment of messages encouraging us to fix ourselves, I just want you to know that you are enough. And that's not an opinion—you just are.

With your strengths and your weaknesses, a six pack or a keg, flawless skin or scars from torturous teenage years. Whatever sags, wrinkles, or has unexpected hair coming out of it. Whether your screen time is 30 minutes or 3 hours every day, you love or hate your job, or have a perfect or imperfect relationship with those you love. If you're where you thought you would be in life or wonder how you ended up where you are. If you're still trying to be an adult and just fit into the damn jeans, eat a salad sometimes, and get the oil changed when you're supposed to.

You are enough.

If you want to make resolutions, go for it. Get fitter, eat better, put down the phone, cut back on booze, be a better partner or parent. But don't do it because you think you need to. Do it because you want to—from a place of realizing that if you end 2026 the exact way you ended 2025, you're still enough.