Less Noise, One Focus, Just Maintenance

🌱 HEALTHY

Maintenance Over Optimization

The beginning of the year is probably the worst time to try optimizing your health routine, but that's exactly when most people decide they need to fix everything.

You're traveling more, your schedule's off, you're eating different food, sleeping at weird times. And somehow this is when you convince yourself you need a perfect morning routine or some elaborate workout split or a strict meal plan to “start the new year right.“

It rarely works because you're trying to build something new when you can barely maintain what you already have.

Forget about optimization for a moment and just focus on maintenance. Keep the basics going and call it a win.

Sleep matters more than your supplement stack. Moving your body matters more than the perfect workout program. Eating mostly decent food matters more than tracking macros. These basics are what keep you functional, especially when everything else is chaotic.

This is where the nomad lifestyle actually teaches you something useful. When you're constantly changing locations and time zones and routines, the only habits that survive are the ones that work anywhere. You can't rely on your perfect home setup or your favorite gym or your meal prep routine. You need things that hold up when life gets messy.

So instead of adding more complexity, just ask yourself what you can realistically maintain at the beginning of Jan. Maybe it's just getting outside once a day. Maybe it's hitting 7 hours of sleep most nights. Maybe it's one workout a week instead of five.

It sounds like you're lowering the bar, and you are. But a low bar you actually clear beats a high bar you never reach. And once you make it through this period without feeling overwhelmed by all the demands you’ve placed on yuorself, you're in a way better position to build on it later.

Takeaway: Pick the 1-2 health basics you can realistically maintain. Ignore everything else until this becomes a staple and just focus on not losing ground.

🪙 WEALTHY

Your 30-Minute Year-End Money Check

Most people will hit January trying to fix ten financial things at once and then end up changing nothing, which I've definitely done before.

New year hits and suddenly you're convinced you're going to save more, invest better, cut spending, build an emergency fund, maybe start that side hustle you've been thinking about. Then by February you're right back to the same patterns because trying to overhaul everything at the same time is just overwhelming and doesn't actually work.

So here's what I've found actually works - block out 30 minutes before the year ends and just look at your money. Pull up your bank statements from the last few months and see where your money actually went versus where you thought it was going. That gap between those two things tells you everything you need to know.

You'll probably notice patterns you didn't even realize existed. Subscriptions you completely forgot about. Categories where spending crept up without you noticing. Money going toward things you don't even really care about while the stuff that actually matters to you gets ignored.

The key is not trying to fix all of it at once. Just pick one thing to change in January. Not five goals, not some massive financial overhaul, just one specific thing you can actually do.

Maybe it's canceling subscriptions you're not using. Maybe it's setting up one automatic transfer to savings. Maybe it's just tracking your spending for 30 days to see what's actually happening. Whatever it is, just pick one thing and focus on that.

Takeaway: Before the year ends, spend 30 minutes looking at where your money went these last few months. Pick one thing to fix in January and ignore everything else until that one thing becomes automatic.

📚 AND WISE

You Don't Need a Take on That

Someone asked Epictetus how to tell if his students were actually getting anywhere, and he said they'd be getting in fewer arguments. Not winning more. Just having fewer of them entirely.

That feels like the move for 2026. Stop having opinions about everything.

The Stoics were obsessed with this idea. Marcus Aurelius wrote about it constantly, this power to have no opinion. Not in a checked-out, nihilistic way, but more like why am I letting irrelevant stuff take up space in my head when I could just... not.

I catch myself doing this constantly. Getting frustrated or angry about something I have zero influence over. None of it serves me. It's just background noise that makes everything harder.

Author Ryan Holiday quotes this line from Thomas Jefferson: "Neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." If something doesn't do either, I probably don't need a take on it.

And obviously this isn't about important stuff. Things that genuinely matter, things you can actually affect, people you care about - have all the opinions you want there. Fight for those.

I'm talking about the endless stream of trivial garbage we've convinced ourselves requires our commentary. Like we're all running competing news networks in our heads, staffed exclusively by one very tired person who just wants a nap.

Takeaway: What if next year was just quieter? Not checked out, just focused on what actually counts.