A personal retrospective for 2025. This is mostly for me to reflect on the past year and to reason about how I want to approach 2026.

The year in one glance:

• I got engaged!
• Quarterly goals improved my completion rates by 10-20 percentage points
• I focused mostly on work leadership and powerlifting

The Quarterly Experiment

Last year I wrote:

I switched to quarterly goals at work. I feel like this makes much more sense than yearly goals. It is hard for my mind to really grasp the enormity of an entire year, but I can carefully track a week at a time and link it upwards to the overarching quarter.

2025 was the first year I applied this to personal goals. Verdict: it works. Completion rates by quarter:

Overall ~70% vs historical 50-60% with annual goals. The tracking horizon fix is validated. The content of goals still follows old patterns though.

Quarter 1

Make notebook a part of routine

The physical notebook was a hit. Fountain pen + daily entries + therapy talking points. I got a large Leichterm notebook and a Lamy Safari pen. It is enjoyable to try out newish hobbies at a very beginner level (fountain pens). The notebook logging habit worked very well Q1 - Q3 or so. I think to really lock it in, I need a more standardized morning or night routine that includes it. The choice of either dictates what the notes look like:

• morning means more goals for the day, forward thinking things
• evening means recaps of yesterday, more thoughts, less mental acuity (I'm pretty tired by EOD), maybe better journaling.

The meta goals (dashboard, meditation) didn't happen — a familiar pattern. I spent a lot of time reworking Emacs, which seems to happen every year. I enjoy it though.

I made several apps in Clojure and ClojureScript this quarter, which was fun. I also started using a CPAP machine; it took weeks to adjust but it's great now.

Books I read this quarter:

They Just Need to Get a JobMary Brosnahan

BoomByrne Hobart & Tobias Huber

Pieces of the ActionVannevar Bush

Thinking in SystemsDonella Meadows

Quarter 2

Mobility Routines

The mobility routines were a smash hit — I used GPT to generate warmups tailored to each training day, which actively helped rehab my shoulders and knee. This is the new lever: AI-assisted goal execution.

Train study didn't stick. I tried doing a grab bag of studying and projects on the train, but it wasn't consistent enough. Unstructured learning seems to need more structure for me.

Major Unplanned Events in Q2:

• I got engaged in May! We took a trip to the Berkshires.
• I went to London for work — my first international travel. Walked around Hyde Park, visited the Tate Modern, and saw My Neighbor Totoro as a play (it was excellent).
• I started a LotR book club with 8 friends. We did roughly biweekly activities: hiking, a castle museum trip, visiting an arboretum. Turns out community even helps with leisure.
• Played pickleball several times. Very fun.

Books I read this quarter:

Poor Charlie's AlmanackCharles T. Munger

The Fellowship of the RingJ.R.R. Tolkien

Tiny ExperimentsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

PrinciplesRay Dalio

Quarter 3

Best quarter of the year in terms of goal completion -- ~93%.

Powerlifting meet

Over 2 years I dropped 50 lbs and still managed to increase my bench/deadlift/squat from my bests when I competed at 200lbs in the 165lb class. I got a regional record for my weight class, age class, and federation (very specific!). I also did my first water cut (168 → 164.8). The powerlifting meet at the beginning of this quarter was the culmination of a long period of consistent effort, and it paid off. Now I'm roughly in the weight class sweet spot to be competitive and have a lot of runway to focus on building strength at a reasonable body fat percentage.

Cardio really helped my HRV and reduced my RHR to 50 (a PR for me). I discovered Pandemic with my dad — collaborative board games are very fun.

I started reading domain-specific books in PE and leadership. I ended up reading Mastering Private Equity for a second time (I read the first edition when I started my job), and understood it this time around.

One of the books I read in Q2 talked about small experiments, which inspired me to start playing chess for the first time in my life. I went from ~100 ELO as a complete beginner to ~400 this quarter. Chess has been a lot of fun and I kept up with it throughout the rest of the year. I'm not entirely sure where it stands in 2026, will have to consider whether this small experiment continues.

Books I read this quarter:

DoppelgangerNaomi Klein

Can't Hurt MeDavid Goggins

Never FinishedDavid Goggins

The Almanack of Naval RavikantEric Jorgenson

The Two TowersJ.R.R. Tolkien

Mastering Private EquityClaudia Zeisberger

AbundanceEzra Klein

Quarter 4

This was my lowest completion rate (~62%). I was sick for 5.5 weeks and wedding planning took up a lot of bandwidth.

Wedding Planning

Wedding Planning went really well. We have a lot of support from the venue and caterer planners.

Hypertrophy Block

This quarter I shifted from a strength → peaking block to a hypertrophy block. I gained ~11 lbs, ~7 of which was muscle (or so my scale claims). I focused on sumo deadlift, which I'd never done before. It's now roughly equal to my best conventional, and I enjoy the form much more.

Chess hit 550 ELO by the end of December. I published 18 blog posts on engineering and private equity topics. Each post was like a mini project — a great way to learn.

I only did 6/12 Advent of Code days. Not super interested at the moment. I think I'm getting worse at coding the more I use AI.

I started using agents heavily this quarter. I've really enjoyed the increased context scope and tool use that agents provide.

I also started Life Ops with Todoist for daily chores — so far it's been good. It's daily recurring chores mixed with a todo list. For each recurring item, I think about lowering friction as much as possible.

Books I read this quarter:

Private Equity Laid BareLudovic Phalippou

AccelerateNicole Forsgren

Why We're PolarizedEzra Klein

BreakneckDan Wang

The Return of the KingJ.R.R. Tolkien

The Dichotomy of LeadershipJocko Willink & Leif Babin

The Genius MythHelen Lewis

Wisdom Takes WorkRyan Holiday

High Output ManagementAndy Grove

What Compounded

Three things showed compounding returns this year:

1. Agent use. I went from handspun GPT templates early in the year to using agents by Q4. The learning curve on directing AI paid off across domains. GPT mobility routines worked. GPT business mentor worked. In many ways, agentic AI feels like an extension of emacs.

2. Mobility + sumo focus. Specific, targeted practice in powerlifting, specifically the sumo deadlift. Conventional deadlift has been my problem child for the past 3 years. Focusing on sumo as an alternative has been revealing. I haven't experienced skill growth in powerlifting to quite the same degree before. It feels like this is how we get from intermediate to advanced/elite.

3. Domain-specific reading. PE and leadership books that immediately applied to work. Learning in my exact domain where I can apply it immediately pays off faster than general study.

What stalled: Chess hit a plateau. 100→550 ELO was the easy gains phase. Now I'll need deliberate practice to continue. The small experiment phase is over.

Who Showed Up

Two dominant modes this year:

1. Powerlifting seriously. Meet prep, water cut, regional record, sumo exploration. This domain got full commitment.

2. Work leadership. I probably 5x'd my output and status on my team this year through much wider scope, ownership, and delivery of high value projects.

I slowly stepped into being a developer leader on my team. This wasn't a stated goal — it just emerged from consistent ownership and delivery.

I sometimes feel like using agents is cheating. I'm not sure if that's valid, since I assume everyone else is using them in some way or another. Worth sitting with. If agents are a tool, using them well is a skill. The discomfort might be about attribution, or about the gap between effort and output.

Tradeoffs I Made

What did I deprioritize to make this year work?

Basically the rest of my life outside of work and lifting. I didn't do much in the way of music, extracurriculars like D&D after Q1, etc. I did take a few vacations, but the amount of effort I applied outside of work and lifting was lower. I worked some intense hours for weeks at a time several times this year.

The question for 2026: Was this the right tradeoff? Is work + lifting where I want to keep focusing, or is it time to rebalance?

Looking Back: 2022-2025

The quarterly structure fixed the tracking horizon problem. My completion rate went from 50-60% to ~70%. But the content of goals still follows familiar patterns — sleep is hard to nail down, creative work takes a back seat, meta goals don't stick. Now I can see this more clearly.

Some patterns across four years:

The biggest wins aren't planned. GPT adoption (2023), health transformation (2024), team leadership (2025) — none of these were explicit goals. They emerged from explore time or unplanned identity shifts. The goals track incremental progress; the real growth often happens elsewhere.

External accountability is a reliable lever. Powerlifting coach, Summit habits, book clubs, wedding milestones. When other people are involved, things happen.

Creative goals keep not happening. Four years now. This year adds context: it was an active tradeoff for work + lifting. Worth asking honestly — do I actually want this, or do I like the idea of wanting it?

"Get a coach" keeps appearing. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. Same suggestion. I think I know that if I choose a coach for something, it crystallizes and I'm likely to stick with it. I'm not sure what objective function I'm working on here.

The powerlifting meet was a highlight. The physical transformation over 2+ years (210 → 165 → 172) is complete. This domain has graduated from goal to routine.

I got engaged. That was pretty wonderful.

A shift in framing:

• 2022-2024: "What patterns do I notice? What should I adjust?"
• 2025: "What tradeoffs am I actually making, and are they right?"

2026

Some notes for next year:

• Limit goals per time period. Worth seeing if fewer goals means better focus. Maybe faster turnarounds? What does monthly iteration look like?
• Make sleep concrete. Something like "in bed by 8:30pm 90% of nights." I'll be fully RTO'd next year — maybe that enforces consistency.
• Decide on art/music intentionally. It was an active tradeoff this year. Commit with structure (coach, scheduled time), or let it go.
• Keep using AI assistance. This is a real lever.
• Keep community goals. They consistently deliver.
• Build in slack for disruption. Q4 got hit by illness. Some buffer would help.