Evie walked toward me. She was in normal Saturday AM attire. T-shirt, sweatpants, slippers, headphones connected to the iPad in the crook of her arm. Evie is my 14 year old twin daughter. I greeted her with my normal joy to see her and disdain toward the iPad in her arm. She proceed to tell me how she’s planning her 2026. I was pleasantly surprised. She told me she was watching a podcast. I encouraged her for looking to create a plan.
I walked her into my office. I showed her my bookcases with dozens of books that offer ways to plan better, do better and be better. I told her, “I probably only needed one of the books if I actually did what it said.”
I told her about a Toyota Way of thinking, “Standardized before Optimize”. I reflected on the many times I started to change the process, improve the process before I even did the process.
It’s easy to watch a podcast about planning a year and fall prey to the bias that tells us we just did something, achieving an outcome, when all we did was accumulate more knowledge without putting it to use. I asked Evie to guess the one thing I wanted her to do while she watched her video.
She guessed on the first try. “Take notes.” “Yes!”, I said. “Why?” I asked. “So I have a plan?”, she answered guessing. “Yes! And what do you need to do to make the plan useful?”, I asked. “Do what I planned!” “Exactly!”, I responded.
I have been a master of baiting myself into not taking action while improving the the plan and process by which I plan to act. Process and planning as procrastination.
Dan Pink’s YouTube Video to plan 2026 in 26 minutes hit my queue last week. I felt I needed to watch it. I hadn’t planned my year with us hosting family for 9 days over the holidays and then recovering from hosting family for 5 days.
I watched the video, over 4 days. I was happy about finishing. That was a win. Yet I realized it was yet another book read, video watched, podcast listened to. Dan threw a kitchen sink of tools and tactics at me. It was good but it was overwhelming. I felt myself sinking into old avoidant behaviors and tendencies.
I decided to do what any other person in 2026 would do. I went to AI.
First I asked Copilot to help me plan my year and build AI agents to support my endeavors. Right as I was about to commit to working with Copilot to execute on the approach and plan it proposed, I realized that I’ve found AI chat bots to be wrong before. I decided to use another Chatbot to see its approach.
Procrastinating? Maybe.
I worked with ChatGPT for a few minutes. A different tone and approach. It also felt like a decent direction. Then I went to Claude.
Claude did a better job of ‘Getting Me” than ChatGPT or Copilot. It’s interesting how I find each to have their own personality and strengths.
I am here, writing for the first time in 7 years, because I realized in concert with Claude that my goal for 2026 needed to be to show up for myself in simple ways before know myself well enough to create a complex plan with a fleet of AI agents to support my plan across 8 dimensions of life.
One of my goals to show up for myself is to write for 15 – 30 minutes a day in an observational style. To day was my first step. Will I find that this is the first step of a thousand miles? And if it is, will the thousand miles lead to something or end in a circle. I don’t know.
Part of the structure I created with Claude was to save me from the questions of “Will this scale?”, “Where will this take me?”, “What impact will this have?” to free me to just be myself for myself in this moment with myself. Claude bluntly encouraged me to stop trying to figure out how this will work and start showing up for myself, simply, everyday.
In forty years, Evie will be with future 54 year old self. I hope the conversation we had this morning was a nudge that created an impact, took her somewhere, and helped her to find a path to help the many.
That journey started today.
What journey do you need to start. What’s the smallest step that you can take, even though it makes you a little gut sick to think about it.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Let’s go somewhere. Together. Today. We can see where we wind up. Tomorrow.
