My message to you for the new year

Hello internet friend,

The new year is upon us so before I say anything else, let me tell you this:

I hope you’re well wherever you find yourself and I wish you all the very best in this new year. May it be kind to you and your loved ones.

After the festivities of the past couple of days, I spent the day today thinking about what it is I actually want to share with you.

What is it that I’m carrying with me into this new year?

Back in 2016, I was applying for a job as a copywriter at a tech company.

Up until that point, I’d been working as an entrepreneur and was trying to jump onto the corporate train.

I wasn’t — or at least I didn’t feel — competent for the job.

I had done a ton of writing in the form of scripts and proposals but I hadn’t done what they were looking for.

So, as I progressed through the interview process, I was given the task write an article about the local start-up scene.

I was given a week.

And so, imposter syndrome on full blast, I had no choice but to get to work.

I made a new Twitter account and reached out to people I thought would be interesting to talk to: start-up founders and investors, both from the local scene and from abroad.

To my huge surprise, the majority of people I contacted generously got back to me, either by giving me information or agreeing to a call.

If I had felt nervous before, now my body was alight with a strange mixture of fear and excitement.

I had jumped into this without thinking too much about it and now I had real people meeting me in real life.

That’s how I spent the next few days speaking with super interesting people from a world I knew close to nothing about. I felt like I was being given a private behind-the-scenes tour of something I had made the entrance ticket to.

It was interesting, exciting, and thrilling!

I felt like someone who’d put on a high visibility jacket and, carrying a ladder, had bluffed my way into places with previously closed doors.

I went onto finish the article, but only just enough to submit it for my job application.

I got the job and the thing that had fueled me to move beyond my discomfort was gone. Unfortunately, I never brought the article to a point where I felt it deserved to be.

It’s now been a decade since this experience and, although it felt deeply meaningful to me, it’s crazy to say that not once have I tried to replicate it.

Not once have I allowed myself to push past the immediate pain of anxiety, even though I know that doing so is the price of entry to anything meaningful.

Why am I telling you this?

If what I just said resonates with you, I’d wager that things tend not to happen in your life if there isn’t a big enough reason for them to happen.

Intellectually, it’s easy enough to know that some things are worth doing (because they’ll bring financial, health or other benefits); it’s another thing entirely to embody all the emotions that those actions tend to produce.

So I ask you, what’s driving you? What is it you really want to do in this new year?

And now, what’s holding you back?

For me, I’ve been allowing fear stop me from going out into the world and interact with it in a way that is truthful to me.

I’m working on this and I’m proud of the steps I’ve taken. I’m excited — and still scared! — to continue to do so in 2026.

Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? It’s not about feeling fear and letting it consume you.

It’s about feeling the fear, acknowledging it, and still stepping forward into doing whatever you want to do.

If this resonated with you, reply to this email: what it is you really want to achieve in 2026? And what’s holding you back?

I’m here to support you because, if there’s one thing I’m learning, we don’t have to do this alone.

You got this! 💪