My 3 Words: 2026
Every year, I select 3 words that act as guideposts for the year ahead. Here’s how I did in 2025 and where I plan to grow in 2026.
First, let me hold myself accountable.
2025 Results
Last year, I picked the following words (w/self scoring in parentheses)
AI (A-)
Micro Moments (A)
Phoenix (B)
In short, not bad!
On the AI side, I had the privilege of joining Every as an AI Fellow. There, I conducted over 60 customer interviews, built a dozen or so training sessions, and really pushed the boundaries of my experience writing prompts for real-world use cases.
On the personal side, it was a breakthrough year for my own AI usage. I’m now an active Cloud Code user, and I have come to embrace AI as an essential tool in my workflows. I estimate I am 2-2.5x more productive than I was a year ago. It’s hard to believe, but I can look at my time logs and prove it.
There is still plenty of room to grow here, but I feel I’m well on my way.
In terms of micro moments, I feel this is where I knocked it out of the park. My photo app now contains lots of new, core memories with the family… things that we will talk about for years to come. I also made a point of leaning into this with friends, co-workers, and the community. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who feels they are sleepwalking through life.
As for Phoenix? 2025 was a brutal year. I faced many difficult challenges head-on. The amount of stress was hard to process at times, but I kept showing up. Was I perfect? Nope. My coping skills were not always the best, but I eventually got my head above water and feel confident going into 2026.
So overall an A-
And that is a win in my book.
Now looking forward to 2026.
Interruption Judo
This one makes sense in my head, but it might be tricky to explain. Let’s see how I do.
Ever since becoming a father of two kids, life has been full of lots of interruptions. I have two very active and talkative children. As a result, there are many interruptions (sometimes a half dozen in a minute). For someone who likes to do deep work, this is challenging and frustrating.
At some point, I’ve developed a bit of learned helplessness, where I stop starting things because I know I’m going to get interrupted any minute. This leads to self-defeat and the thought, “Why bother starting?” Unfortunately, this leads to not starting at all, which is even worse.
I did a bit of a Scott Adams reframe and said, “Well, how could I change my approach to this?” Similar to Elizabeth Gilbert’s advice in her book Big Magic, I had to figure out how to make progress in small chunks vs long stretches of time.
The idea of Judo came to mind. In Judo, you take the energy of the opponent, and you convert it into your own attack. I realized I could still make progress by using AI to offload requests and have the results come back to me minutes later, maybe once the interruption is over, with the results.
Bingo!
This has the added benefit of giving me lots of practice to further increase my reps with AI on the go.
We’ll see if it works out, but I’m going to give it a try.
Kill criteria
I love Annie Duke’s book, Quit, particularly its concept of kill criteria. As a poker player, you literally need to know when to hold them, when to fold them. Unfortunately, many people hold a bad hand far too long.
The metaphor applies to all aspects of life. As someone who is highly loyal and typically joins a company, knowing that it takes at least three to four years to really build momentum and sustainability, I tend to stay in things far too long that I should, even when the warning signs show up within one to two months.
The result: too much effort in a bad bet.
The idea of kill criteria is to set up benchmarks up front that give you accountable checkpoints. That way, instead of just doubling down over and over and over again ad infinitum, you face yourself with accountability face-to-face early on.
I’ve been known to bet on people and things for far too long when I should walk away much faster. This is probably why I faced burnout in the past. I could have saved energy, time, and stress by just walking away sooner, but I didn’t.
So this is a reminder to always set criteria up for every new project or idea and be able to exit them faster, versus trying to keep too many plates spinning.
At the end of 2025, I had over 160 projects active. Most of these were ideas and hobbies I started and never stopped. The result was just too much stress, too many things to track. I eventually pared the list down to about 75 projects, most of them work-related. Even that’s large, but it’s much more manageable. A lot of those open loops have now been killed.
10x > 2x
This is similar to the title of a book by Benjamin Hardy. And it’s an important mindset shift for someone who likes to muscle his way through problems.
Most of us try to do more by just throwing more hours and effort at a problem. To have a true transformational moment, a 10X requires a new strategy, a new way of thinking, and a new approach.
So this is a reminder to me not to just keep throwing hours and effort at things, but to reevaluate.
Whereas Kill Criteria asks me if I’m playing the right game, 10x over 2x asks me, am I playing the game right?
Onward
I don’t suggest that you follow my words for this year. They are very personal to me, reflecting my usual blind spots and current goals. However, rather than New Year’s resolutions, I highly suggest the three-word paradigm because it gives you very easy-to-remember high-level targets instead of trying to remember dozens of wordy goals.
I don’t always do them perfectly, but the daily reminder keeps me focused on making forward progress.