Welcome To 2026 - Just Another Year?

Regardless of what you thought of the show and the finale, I loved the 80’s references. Everything from the MADMAX DigDug high score to Steve duping Risky Business & Hopper giving Indiana Jones vibes, it was an 80’s fest for the ages.

Even though all of the 80s references landed perfectly in my nostalgia bucket throughout the run of the show, we still have to look forward…(I mean, the world is safe from Vecna & the Mindflayer now, so we might as well think about what’s happening in our chapterneXt.

Planning is hard - even for people who are good at it. There are a million ways to make a go forward plan…but in my decades of working with entrepreneurs, I find that they either don’t plan enough, or they plan too much. And with older entrepreneurs, I’ve discovered that most of them plan too much.

It’s not really their fault. After all they have the most experiential data, they can see many of the complex edge cases that they might encounter…and they end up with a complex, multi-variate plan that doesn’t really have a chance of being acted upon.

I used to do this thing with my clients where I asked them to imagine themselves on the next New Year’s Eve…and they were toasting to their top 3 accomplishments of that year. Then we’d work backwards 1 step and identify the circumstances that had to exist in order for that accomplishment to be possible. And then we’d take another step back and identify what needed to exist for those circumstances to exist & so on. That was a really fun exercise, but it has too many moving parts. Emotions and fictitious memories and moving backwards through time was a little too “woo-woo” for many. So a very fun & informative exercise that didn’t have the right level of “stickiness”.

Using a combination of things that I learned along the way, including the idea of “rocks” from Verne Harnish’s great book Scaling Up, I realized that simple is better than complex when it comes to long-range planning. My ADHD often gets in the way here and wants to make a complex, but very elegant, plan that is built with the structural integrity of gossamer wings and cotton candy. To save me from me, I came up with a completely original idea of central goal surrounded by a narrow set of influences that make that goal possible. It would take my Rube Goldberg plan and turn it into a compact but truly robust way to focus on a goal. I was trembling with excitement - THIS was amazing & I am a genius (allowing myself to think that once in a while is a happy place for me…what can I say?). So I made a simple way to visualize how to achieve a goal:

So, my brilliant idea preceded me by a couple of millennia, but whatevs. Getting your 2026 plan in place is an exercise in curation, not completeness. There are too many things to think about and each have variables attached to them that you almost certainly don’t know about yet.

Curate your goals into something that is CLEAR. And then define the supporting elements…like this goal of $1mm in 2026 Revenue:

Instead of trying to think about this from a complicated “what ad campaigns do I need to run to generate 11.87 leads per week so that I can close 6 at $XXX, and I make $YYY…” That is too many variables to think about all at once…and despite what you like to imagine, nobody is really good at multi-tasking.

Each one of these buckets is an element that will make the goal possible or impossible depending on your success in that bucket. Even though my ADHD brain TRULY believes that it can see “the big picture”, I can’t. So, instead of thinking about all the things needed to generate $1mm…I start with a bucket that will contribute to making $1,000,000 …in this case, marketing:

There is a long list of questions that we could come up with…but because we are only thinking about 1 element that makes $1mm possible, you can get into a flow and realize that each question gets you closer and closer to the essential things that you need to do in that bucket to make your big idea happen.

Each one of the buckets might feel like a huge, bottomless pit of options and decisions…but all you need to do is keep on asking questions and deciding if the answer is needed for you to hit your goal. You might come up with 50 questions in a bucket…but when you sort them out, you might only have 4 or 5 things in that bucket that REALLY matter.

But you don’t have to think about them all at once. Many of the things that you might think you have to plan for are just extensions of what you already do. When you are planning against these big goals, it helps to realize that there are generally only a few things that are of PRIMARY importance to help you hit your goals…

Remember this:

Now go and kick some 2026 ass…

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