My #1 Career/Life Unlock: Thoughtful Goals

🧠 Takeaways:

How did I do against my 2025 + 2026 goals:

1. Hits and misses.

2. Major focuses for this year.

3. Greatest lesson from missing most of my 2025 goals.

+ How I create my annual goals.

LBAB Community: How I Create My Annual Goals

Every EOY, I sit down + analyze the 7 core pillars of a successful life:

1. Physical

2. Mental

3. Spiritual

4. Philosophical

5. Financial

6. Charitable

7. Love

And I deeply think about the areas that I want to improve the most in each category. It’s an incredible reflection exercise that helps understand:

1. What I value

2. What I want to change

3. What I believe would make my life better

4. What I want to spend my time + resources on this year

In the end, it shows me when the rubber meets the road, what do I actually prioritize?

If you haven’t set goals yet, it doesn’t take long. 

Usually it takes me 2–3 hours when things are quiet to really reflect on the 1 thing I want to address in each category.

Let’s Review My 2025 Goals

In 2025, I had 7 major goals across my life.

I’m proud of my year, and I finally hit some of the largest goals of my career, but I only accomplished 3/7 goals.

 It really showed what my priorities were.

Personal Life

• ✅ Pick up a hobby that doesn’t involve a screen.

  • I’m really proud to have found a hobby I can’t monetize. My wife and I started playing Catan with our friends. No screens. Social interaction. Actually use my brain. Perfection.

Health

• ❌ Get back to monthly therapy sessions by March.

  • This has been the most frustrating goal for me to consistently miss on. 2 years in a row, I’ve said that I was going to prioritize my mental health, and 2 years in a row, I made no meaningful progress on it.

Career

• ✅ Acquire Biz #1 + operate it before the end of the year.

  • Acquiring + running Coco was my crowning achievement of the year.

• ❌ Grow my audience to 75k Followers and 12m views

  • Too aggressive of a stretch goal in a year that was dominated by acquiring a biz. 

Financial/Investments

• ❌ Build up our Passive income so that our Monthly expenses = my wife’s Salary + the passive income.

  • Another victim to acquiring Coco. We’ve gone in the opposite direction, and honestly, this will get worse before it gets better.

Philanthropy

• ❌ Go on our First Philanthropic trip + donate to causes we believe in.

  • I need to be honest with myself and realize that at this point in my life, I need to build my own family's well-being first before I can meaningfully help others. It hurts to not do anything here, but I need to focus on my own exponential outcome first. Then I can impact other people’s lives.

Spiritually

• ✅✅ Complete my 1st first Misogi Challenge.

  • I completed my first 3-day fast in 2025 and enjoyed it so much I did it a 2nd time before EOY. This was an incredible experience of really pushing my boundaries that also felt great on my body.

Bottom Line: Coco AI ended up dominating my year. I really overestimated how much I would be able to tackle while taking on the greatest challenge of my career to date.

It was a humbling experience. And another incredible reminder how much focusing on 1 goal is the most important.

Let’s Crush 2026

Personal Life

• Take short breaks from work 1x/quarter.

  • I’m burning out too much + too hard from my current schedule:  5am–7pm 5x/week + 8 hrs on Saturdays. I need to find short breaks to recharge every quarter.

Health

• Get back to monthly therapy sessions by March.

  • This has to be the year. If I don’t make it for the 3rd year in a row, I’m not sure I ever will.

Career

• 2x Coco AI’s ARR run rate this year.

  • This will be the goal that dominates my life this year.

Financial/Investments

• Build up 6-months of expenses in the bank,  just in case.

  • I put a lot into Coco + didn’t take a salary until Dec. I’m not on the verge of bankruptcy, but also need more of a cushion so I can start thinking more long term.

Philanthropy

• None.

  • This hurts, but instead of half-assing here without the time or resources, I need to accept my current situation and pause this for a year. I’m hoping we still donate to causes we believe in, but that will be the extent of our focus for 2026.

Spiritually

• Extended Misogi: Do a 3-day fast 1x/quarter.

  • I did Fast #1 in Sep + Fast #2 in Dec 2025. The quarterly cadence feels great. I plan on doing the next 1 in Feb and continue every 3 mos through the year.

Final Thought - The Pareto Principle applies to every part of your life. 

The greatest lesson I learned from the Coco AI acquisition last year is how aerodynamic you need to make your entire life if you want to be successful.

I was overly ambitious thinking I could Buy A Biz + operate it full time + still accomplish so much across the rest of my life.

I always think it’s too harsh, but I should have abandoned all of my other goals to fully dedicate myself to Coco AI.

It wouldn’t have been the life I wanted to lead and would have set me back across many key areas of my life.

But that happened anyway, and I felt guilty for not accomplishing my other goals that ended up distracting me from Coco.

I hate the concept of balance. 

It’s a false premise that pushes people to work on projects they aren’t interested in.

When I really think about it, I’ve traded all other areas of my life today so that in the future I don’t have to work and can overinvest in the other areas of my life for the rest of my life.