My 2026 Goals

I can’t remember the last time I was as excited about the prospects of a new year like I am about this one. It was already shaping up to be incredible with several major milestones including my Daugther’s wedding, my 60th birthday and 30th wedding anniversary. Along with those celebrations we have the World Cup coming to my backyard here in Southern California. So I wanted to outline several goals I’d like to achieve in addition to these exciting events.

Health

Last year I finally got my total knee replacement in May. The road to recovery has been great. I knew that as long as I was diligent about the physical therapy things should go well and they have. I was playing racquetball again within 3 months and have been able to resume hiking as well.

Then on December 1st I made the conscious decision to finally get serious about losing weight. I wanted to get a running start going into the new year and was motivated to look good for the wedding. I joined the Lindora wellness program supplemented with a tirzepatide regimen. While the GLP has been helpful in reducing hunger and food noise its only one factor. I’ve maintained a very strict diet trying to maintain ~60 grams of carbs and ~140 grams of protein daily. I’m also at the gym 5 times a week lifting and playing racquetball. So far, so good. I’ve already dropped over 15 pounds with a goal of 5-10 more. I’m planning to carry the momentum after the wedding to keep me going until my Birthday in May.

Travel

I had high hopes to cheer on my beloved Argentina team as it defends its title ahead of the World Cup with plans to see a game in each of the 3 host countries. But after the debacle so far with ticket sales with prices being astronomical and only purchaseable through lotteries, I’ve tempered my expectations. Now I’m just hoping to at least see a game or two at SoFi. Of course this may change once the full tickets are released and we see what the secondary markets do.

Then I’m planning destination celebrations for my 60th birthday somewhere in Mexico and our 30 year anniversary with an epic location TBD. I’m sure I’ll also sneak in several more trips here and there to try and make up for the lack of traveling last year as I focused on the knee recovery and the wedding.

Personal Projects

This year I saw the innovations in AI transform how I thought about so many things both for work and personally. Sure I played around with the image and video generation tools and had lots of fun. But there were so many other uses that surprised me. In March I decided to try out vibe coding and while the results weren’t great, they showed me what was coming. Just a short time later in December I shifted to use Google’s AntiGravity IDE using the Claude coding models and the improvement was astounding. I was able to build several apps already with very little debugging. I’m just blown away with what is possible. I plan on creating 2 app ideas based around digital legacy that I’ve always wanted to but never had the skills or resources for. Speaking of Digital Legacy I plan on spending much more time working on my resource website. I also hope to continue writing and sharing more on this site and beef up my Autobigraphical experiment site.

I’ve also been amazed by what the AI agents can do by giving it commands and having it take over my browser. I’ve had AI write complex Excel forumulas and power queries I could never do on my own. I’ve had AI do deep research on products and services that would take me hours to do manually. AI will continue to get better, and the people that learn to embrace and harness the tools will be much better off. I will continue to share as many of my use cases and tools to try and help others.

Content Creation vs. Consumption

This has always been an inner struggle for me. There’s that window of time between dinner and sleep when I have to make the conscious decision on whether I want to work on personal projects or just decompress and watch TV or play a video game. The struggle is real but I’ve been pretty motivated to shift quite a bit towards the create side of the equation lately. My goal is to try and get these to a 50/50 split but if new games like Battlefield 6 and shows like Pluribus continue to be released I might be in trouble. Luckily I don’t spend much time on social media except for X which I visit daily because that’s the best place to keep up with AI news and creators.

Minimalism and Optimization

I started my minimalism journey a few years ago and its actually been going well. I’ve been able to purge so many physical objects and make conscious efforts to analyze whenever considering new products or services being added to my life. I always try to make sure it aligns with making my life better and optimizes for time efficiency which is a major deciding factor. This will continue to be my mantra moving forward trying to reduce complexity and embrace simplicity.