As We Go Dark.....

We leave you with the sentiment above and close out the year with the following courtesy of Ryan Holiday, as we look forward to being of service in 2026

Happy Holidays!!!

​The Secret To Better Habits In 2026​ Here we are…past the halfway point of the 2020s. With another year looming before us, I’ve been thinking, if I could flash forward to December 2026, what would it take for me to look back and call it a good year? What challenges will I have taken on? What changes will I have made? What will I have learned? What good will I have done? I don’t know what 2026 has in store, but I do know that if it’s going to be a good year, it won’t be an accident. It won’t just happen. It will take work. “First tell yourself what kind of person you want to be,” Epictetus said, “then do what you have to do. For in nearly every pursuit we see this to be the case. Those in athletic pursuit first choose the sport they want, and then do that work.” Here are some habits, some best practices, some of the work I am going to do to try to make 2026 a good year. Many of these were inspired by The Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, which starts on January 1st . It’s a big part of my year each year—kicking things off with something that challenges me—and I hope you’ll join us on January 1st. (Sign up here, and learn more about the challenge below). Protect The Best Part Of Your Day This is where it all starts: with how you spend the best part of your day. The novelist Philipp Meyer​ (whose book ​​The Son​​ is an incredible read) told me on the Daily Stoic podcast, “You have to be very careful about to what (and to whom) you’re giving the best part of your day.” Well-intentioned plans fall apart as the day progresses. Our willpower evaporates. The world makes its demands. So it’s key that we prioritize the important things and that we habitualize doing them early. Personally, I fiercely protect my mornings—family first, then writing. My assistant knows not to schedule anything before mid-morning because early calls and meetings don’t just take time—they sap the energy needed for the essential work. I want to give my best self to my most important things. Everything else can come after. Think Small The writer James Clear talks about the idea of “atomic habits” (and has a really good book with the same title—it was actually the first book someone bought from The Painted Porch). An atomic habit is a small habit that makes an enormous difference in your life. He tells the story of how the British cycling team transformed themselves by focusing on 1% improvements in every area—tiny adjustments that, over time, added up to extraordinary results. It’s a simple but powerful concept: small actions, done repeatedly, accumulate into something significant. Accept Mediocrity It's counterintuitive but having high standards can be the enemy of improvement, causing you to avoid or abandon everything that feels beneath those standards. As Churchill said, another way to spell “perfectionism” is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). Jerry Seinfeld once said that if he were to teach a writing class, “I would teach them to learn to accept your mediocrity. You know, no one’s really that great. You know who’s great? The people that just put a tremendous amount of hours into it.” It's the same with self-improvement. The first draft of a new habit, a new discipline, a new you—it’s going to be clumsy and awkward and imperfect. Accept that, and focus on just making a little progress each day. Do Less, Better When I talked to the great Matthew McConaughey on the Daily Stoic podcast, he told me the story about a moment a few years ago when he realized he was doing too much. “I had five proverbial campfires on my desk,” he said. He had a production company, a music label, a foundation, his acting career, and his family. “What I did was I got rid of two of the campfires.” He called his lawyer and shut down the production company and the music label. “I was left with the three things that were most important to me. And those three campfires turned into bonfires…I had been making C’s in five things, but when I concentrated on three things, I started making A’s.” Marcus Aurelius talked about how doing less brings a double satisfaction: you get to do less and you get to do those things better. As we enter 2026, consider what you might need to say “no” to in order to say “yes” to what matters most. Figure Out Your Defaults Another one from James. On the podcast, we were talking about in-between moments in life. The lulls. The waiting in lines or between meetings. The extra time you weren’t planning to get. What do many of us do in these moments? We get occupied by mindless and meaningless distractions. We check email. We look up at the TV. We gossip. We just sit there waiting for it to be over. Which is why we have to have “good defaults,” James said. “The way I sometimes phrase it is, What do you do when you have nothing to do? … What I’ve really tried to do—I’m still working on this, I definitely don't have this figured out—is have a better answer to, what do I do when I have nothing to do?” My default is reading. I carry a book everywhere. Yours could be meditating. Or stretching, taking a walk around the block, or calling a friend. Whatever it is, figure out what you do when you have nothing to do. Because those in-between moments? They’re not insignificant. They are your life! It’s time, time you won’t ever get back. So use it. Because it adds up, shaping not just our days but our lives. Don’t Be Ashamed To Ask For Help Whenever I speak to military groups, I like to share one of my favorite lines from Meditations: “Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” I love how Marcus Aurelius delivers that line—with a shrug. So what? There’s no shame in needing help. Whether it’s therapy, asking for advice, or hiring someone to support you, seeking help is often the key to breakthroughs, growth, and success. Tim Ferriss has a great question that ties into this: What would this look like if it were easy? Often, the answer involves creating support systems or finding the right kind of help. Building habits, achieving goals, or even just making progress isn’t something you have to do alone. Use Commitment Devices At a critical moment in The Odyssey, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the sirens, Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship. In doing so, he became the first to hear them without steering and crashing into the rocks—where countless sailors before him had been lured to their deaths. On the podcast, behavioral scientist Katy Milkman talked about this as the original example of what’s known in behavioral science as a “commitment device”—a way of deliberately constraining ourselves to help us achieve our goals. What made Odysseus different from every other sailor who had been lured by those beautiful Sirens was not that he had more willpower or discipline. It was that he was wise enough to know he didn’t. He understood that in the moment, with those beautiful voices calling, he’d be just as weak as everyone else. So he came up with a way to protect himself from himself. It’d be wonderful if we always did what we know we want or need to do. But that’s not how the world is. It is filled with temptations, distractions, and forces tugging us toward the rocks. We need commitment devices. We need constraints that protect us from our weaker selves, that keep us on the right course. In 2018, we ran the first Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. It was packed with challenges and exercises inspired by Stoic philosophy. Even I, the person who designed the challenge, found it transformative. Why? Because being part of a group, all working together, created a sense of accountability and momentum. Knowing others were pushing themselves alongside me made it easier to stay committed and go further than I might have on my own. As we kick off 2026, we’re doing another Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge—a 21-day program to build momentum for the rest of the year. If you’re looking to improve your habits, consider finding a similar challenge. It doesn’t matter what it’s about or who’s doing it with you; what matters is having a structure and a community to support you. Do It Now Seneca said that it’s the one thing fools all have in common: they are always getting ready to start. It’s pretty funny actually, we see this every year. Starting in early December, we start talking about the New Year, New You Challenge​, but you know what day—year after after—always has close to the most sign ups? January 1st…after it’s already started! Our customer service team spends the first 3-4 days of the year filtering through emails from people saying something like, “I know I’m late but I’d love to do this. Can you still let me in?” (So if you’re considering joining us in this year’s Challenge, don’t wait, sign up now!) To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you’ll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now). It’s not going to be any easier later. It also might not be that difficult right now. That’s the funny thing you find about the stuff you put off—when you finally get around to it, you realize you’ve been dreading something that was actually pretty simple, that only took a few minutes. So in 2026 and beyond, constantly remind yourself: Later is a lie. It’s only going to get harder the longer you wait. Stop putting it off. Do what you need to do. Not Later. Now. Make Time For Strenuous Exercise Adopting a new habit, making a change, doing anything challenging always seems daunting at first. As I write about in Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, we can’t just hope to be brave when it counts. Courage has to be cultivated. To do the big things that scare you, start with smaller things—start with developing the ability to push yourself to do stuff you’re reluctant to do. To be able to endure the cold reception of a bold idea, start with enduring a cold shower. To be able to step forward when the stakes are high, regularly do that when the stakes are low. To be able to embrace the discomfort of a major life change, accustom yourself to minor discomforts. We treat the body rigorously, Seneca said, so that it may not be disobedient to the mind. We push ourselves in little ways so the big ways stop seeming quite so big, quite so out of character. We minimize fear by making the act of overcoming it routine. We test ourselves to prepare for the tests of life. By methodically and deliberately exposing ourselves to small challenges, what once seemed daunting becomes manageable, even routine. Go The F*ck To Sleep All the other habits and practices listed here become irrelevant if you don’t have the energy and clarity to do them. We have to follow the advice of a book I love to read to my kids: Go the F*ck to Sleep! What time you wake up tomorrow is irrelevant…if you didn’t get enough sleep tonight. In the military, they speak of sleep discipline—meaning it’s something you have to be good at, you have to be conscious of, something you can’t let slip. We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person knows this and guards it carefully. A smart person knows that getting their 7-8 hours of sleep every night does not negatively affect their output, it contributes crucially to their best work. Get Back Up When You Fall The path to self-improvement is slippery, and falling is inevitable. You’ll sleep in and not be able to read that page, you’ll cheat on your diet, you’ll say “yes” and take on too much, or you’ll get sucked into the rabbit hole of social media. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. You’re only a bad person if you give up. It’s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Even the most self-disciplined of us will stagger. All of us have fallen short in the last year…and the years before that. We broke our resolutions. We lost touch with people we care about. We made the same mistakes again and again. We were “jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” as Marcus said. But now it’s time to pick ourselves up and try again. It’s time, Marcus continues, to “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better group of harmony if you keep on going back to it.” In other words, when you mess up, come back to the habits you’ve been working on. Come back to the ideas here in this post. Don’t quit just because you’re not perfect. No one is saying you have to magically transform yourself in 2026, but if you’re not making progress toward the person you want to be, what are you doing? And, more importantly, when are you planning to do it? I’ll leave you with Epictetus, who spoke so eloquently about feeding the right habit bonfire. It’s the perfect passage to recite as we set out to begin a new year, hopefully, as better people. “From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, or highly or lowly regarded, remember…The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material.”