How I’m planning for 2026 (without the grind)

I love goal setting.

I love a clean spreadsheet. I love a good model. I love taking something fuzzy — a desire, a hunch, a pull toward “something more” — and turning it into a plan I can execute. The quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s has always been one of my favorite weeks of the year for exactly this reason. The world slows down just enough to make space for reflection. For dreaming. For asking better questions.

What’s changed isn’t my love of planning.

It’s what I’m willing to plan for.

There’s this idea floating around — I’m seeing it more and more lately — that if you stop climbing the career ladder, you’ve somehow lost your ambition. That choosing fewer titles, fewer accolades, or a less obvious growth trajectory is a kind of quiet quitting from success itself.

I don’t buy that for a second.

I haven’t lost my ambition.
I’ve simply redirected it.

For a long time, my ambition was singular and sharp-edged. It was aimed squarely at my career, my business, my output. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Go, go, go. Achieve, achieve, achieve. I wanted the proof. The validation. The external markers that said, Yes, you’re doing it right.

In my first business — a clothing company — I girlbossed my ass off. I drank the hustle-culture Kool-Aid with both hands. I believed the hype: if you wanted it badly enough, if you just worked hard enough, if you pushed through the exhaustion, the anxiety, the physical warning signs… it would all be worth it.

And after five years of grind-’til-you-drop entrepreneurship — spending every last nickel I had, sacrificing time with my family, missing birthdays and celebrations, telling myself the exhaustion was temporary and would all be “worth it” — I can tell you this with absolute clarity: hustle culture is not built for people whose entire safety net is their own brain and body.

It works just fine if you have a trust fund, generational wealth, or investors and family members who can quietly write a check when things wobble, but if you don’t, it demands something far more dangerous. This is the part hustle culture never really accounts for: what happens when you are the safety net — when your brain is the product, your body is the engine, and your nervous system is the infrastructure holding the whole thing together.

Because when that system breaks, there is no backup plan and no rescue coming, and once you see that clearly, the mythology collapses. Burning yourself down isn’t brave or disciplined or ambitious — it’s just bad strategy dressed up as virtue.

So now, my ambition looks different.

It’s no longer pointed exclusively at my work. It’s pointed at my life.

I have an ambition for a rich, full, well-rounded life. A beautiful one. A life with time, health, creativity, relationships, rest, pleasure, and yes — meaningful work I genuinely love. My business matters to me deeply. I’m lit up by what I do. But at the end of the day, my business is the engine that funds my life — not the thing I sacrifice my life to.

It creates income so I can travel.
So I can spend time with my family.
So I can spoil the people I love.
So I can invest, rest, explore, and live the way I want to live.

That, too, is ambition.

And it’s from that place — not hustle, not fear, not comparison — that I now set goals.