by Eddie Pipkin

Image by Csaba Nagy from Pixabay

Welcome to 2026!  We made it.  If you have been reading this blog for a long time (thanks!), you’ll know that I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions.  I’m more of an incremental change kind of guy.  But it is important to have regularly scheduled seasons of introspection, analysis, and recalibration, so the calendar year is as good a time as any for taking stock and looking ahead.  It’s a natural season for thinking about what’s been working and what we’d like to change.  The key, as always where such processes are concerned, is asking good questions.  Good questions = useful outcomes!

Any process for looking back and looking ahead is a worthwhile process.

It’s the intentionality, the mindfulness of the act that gives it meaning.  It’s a commitment to “doing things on purpose.”  It’s good to have goals and a plan.  It’s also good to grant ourselves grace that goals don’t have to be relentless and unforgiving – they shouldn’t make us miserable: they should inspire us and energize us, a challenge that’s not just checking off a box but an aim that has spinoff effects that make our lives richer and deeper – and it’s good to have a plan, but not be so fixated on the details of the plan that we are enslaved to their requirements and lose all track of the original goal.

This has to do with the questions with which we start.  Effective questions, in any context – particularly in leadership contexts – anchor everything that follows.  It’s so easy to get sidetracked into metrics that feel like something is happening but ultimately lead to no real, healthy progress.  I had a friend who was reflecting on the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and she began to talk excitedly about her optimism for the months ahead and how she was going to bring that energy to attacking a meaningful goal.  I was a little excited myself to see what creative, challenging goal she was about to announce, but what she said was, “I’m going to lose five pounds.”  Okay, that’s laudable after the holiday season gorge of goodies, but it’s the same ol’ goal 100 million Americans started with on January 2nd!  And it’s the same ol’ tactical target that she and millions of others have stated, achieved, and relapsed on again and again and again.  There are better questions with which we can start related to health, fitness, and well-being.  I won’t bore you with them in this space.

I will instead share with you some ideas that inspired me from other writers I enjoy reading.

The great Kate Bowler wrote her 2026-launching blog about the pitfalls of optimization.  I’m a fan; optimization is a faux religion that is overrated, and it can become an oppressive goal unto itself.  Kate sums it up with a killer quote which she got from Oliver Burkeman:

“The reward for efficiency is usually just more work.”

“[W]e exhaust ourselves trying to fit an infinite amount of expectation into a finite life. We’re constantly budgeting time and energy we don’t have, trying to meet the needs of people we love, the demands we didn’t ask for, the pressure that never lets up. As Oliver puts it, this is another way of denying death. We’re not exactly pretending we’ll live forever. We’re just acting like we can cram forever into right now.”

She suggests that we start with a different set of questions!

Instead of asking, “What can I fix?” (which is where most of us start with our resolutions), she is instead asking, “What kind of life is possible within the limits I actually have?”

She goes on to talk about the concept of limited agency:

It’s a celebration of small, real choices made inside real constraints. Not a fantasy of transformation. Not a dramatic reinvention. Just the steady practice of asking: what is mine to do, and what is not?

Her extended, focusing questions for the new year thus become:

  • What can I stop optimizing?
  • Where can I admit my limited agency?
  • How can I can I make space for interruptions for small kindnesses and surprises and doing a little good?

It’s a refreshing Bowleresque approach: Read the whole thing at her site on Substack, Everything Happens.

Another writer I have cited int his space, Jason Feifer, has a totally different approach.  He likes to give life and purpose to each new year by giving it its own THEME.  He themes the year and celebrates and shares the theme, and he makes the theme broad enough to multiply possibilities for how it can be joyfully engaged (as opposed to being tied down to a tactical goal like “losing five pounds” or “gaining a thousand new subscribers.”  As he phrases it, “Themes don’t lock you into outcomes.”

He begins with the very question that Bowler disdains, in his phrasing, “identifying a central problem to be solved,” then he moves to “set an intention, not an outcome.”  He works that process, asks follow-up questions, and for 2026 ended up with the theme, “Less work, more people.”  (He also believes that the theme should be able to be stated in five words or less, which would make almost every church vision statement I have ever read ineligible as a Feiferesque theme!)  You can read more about his approach at his site, One Thing Better.  It’s easy to see how his embrace of that theme and sharing it with everyone in his life gives him an obvious value / goal to bounce back to in conversations and decision making.  That’s the kind of clarity that keep us on track moving forward into any new year.

It’s an approach that shares the spirit of my local church that embraces the “One Word” strategy.  Instead of a five-word theme, our focus boils down to one solitary word that captures how we want to embrace the challenges and opportunities of 2026!

All of these approaches are valid and viable.  We find the one that works for us, and we lean into it.

As for me, I read two questions for evaluating the year just ended that impacted my thinking.  I’m sorry that I can’t remember where I heard them (and if you know, please let me know in the comments), but here they are:

Thinking back on 2025,

  • What surprised you the most?
  • Why did it surprise you?

Following those two trains of thought honestly led me to some profound conclusions that are now directing my approach to goal setting for 2026.

Find your own most profound and propulsive questions.  Be faithful to following them where they lead.  Head into the months ahead with confidence and purpose.

Keep reading.  Keep studying.  We’re glad you stopped in here.  Happy 2026!