Instead of New Year’s Resolutions, I pick a yearly theme to help me make progress on my goals.

In 2023, it was to Make Art with Friends, which led to me joining Toastmasters and a sketch group. I also started a meetup for local software developers. In early 2024, I extended it by joining The Useful Authors group. Then, in 2024, I chose the theme of “Heavy Lifting” to encompass my fitness program and the work it would take to write a book. Last year, it was Just Keep Swimming, which meant to keep working on my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, and get it done.

This year is about strength training, learning Spanish, and marketing my book. I chose to represent that with the theme “Fuerte Y Suerte”, which means “Strong and Lucky” in Spanish.

The Strong and Spanish part are clear. By lucky, I mean in the sense of writing a bunch of content on this blog, my podcast, my email list, LinkedIn, and other places and hoping that one of those things takes off (as I described in Blog Posts, Randomness, and Optionality). I think of each post as a lottery ticket with a low fixed cost and huge upside potential. Randomness is the Great Creator.

In the past, this led to My Guest Article on Tech Debt for the Pragmatic Engineer and making the front-page of HN, which I described here: My “Show HN” Follow-Up for “Swimming in Tech Debt”. In my life, it has led to writing a book for Manning, being invited to conferences, jobs, etc.

A couple of days ago, I revived my podcast, and the next episode will be about getting lucky.

I took the Seven train into Manhattan often as a teenager. At Queensboro Plaza, I could see the billboard for Eagle Electric with their motto: “Perfection Is Not An Accident”. I think about it a lot. But, I probably have not seen it in person since the nineties. It’s gone now.

Until recently, I didn’t even remember the name of the company, just the motto. I wrote a little bit about this in my book, discussing the power of pithy, memorable value statements.

A year ago, I was at the New York Historical Society, and I saw a painting of it by Pamela Talese (you can see it on her collection of signs).

The feeling of nostalgia was overwhelming. I was instantly sent back to a conversation I had with my high school friends about the sign and its motto.

Luckily, she sells archival quality, Giclée prints of the nighttime one. I bought one and put it right over my monitor so I can see it when I work.

From Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link], I learned to use my personal imperfect work as a jumping off point to a new work. This painting, which shows a company striving for perfection, but coming up short with an imperfect sign, reminds me to keep trying.

It’s one example of Environment Hacking, and what I wrote about a few days ago in Use Motivation To Program Your Environment.

This is the fourth and final post in series of how I am implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] for 2026 towards one goal each in my business, fitness, and personal life. I discussed the first [1st DX], second [2nd DX], and third [3rd DX] disciplines in previous posts.

Personal Growth: [1st DX] Get to CEFR level TBD in Spanish. [2nd DX] Focussed and repeat listening to beginner Spanish podcasts. [3rd DX] Count of podcast listens per week (at least 5 is my preliminary goal)

Business: [1st DX] Make Amazon Ads for my book break even. [2nd DX] Find readers, ask for reviews. [3rd DX] Review count per month (goal is 3 per month)

Fitness: [1st DX] Improve 5 lifts by TBD. [2nd DX] Lift 3x/week. [3rd DX] Pounds added to lifts.

The final discipline is accountability. For my business goal, I already am a member of a writer’s accountability group. For my personal growth goal, I want to get good enough to attend the local Spanish learning meetup by the middle of the year.

And finally, for fitness, I decided to rejoin Crossfit. I need access to barbells and racks (and small increment plates). It’s across the street from my apartment, and there’s a chance it could become a third space.

To add another layer, I will post monthly on this blog as well with just an update and my assessment of whether this plan is working or not.

This is the third post in series of how I am implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] for 2026 towards one goal each in my business, fitness, and personal life. I discussed the first [1st DX] and second [2nd DX] disciplines in previous posts.

• Business: [1st DX] Make Amazon Ads for my book break even. [2nd DX] Find readers, ask for reviews.
• Fitness: [1st DX] Improve 5 lifts by TBD. [2nd DX] Lift 3x/week.
• Personal Growth: [1st DX] Get to CEFR level TBD in Spanish. [2nd DX] Focussed and repeat listening to beginner Spanish podcasts.

In the third discipline, we design scoreboards to tell us if we are winning. The idea here to make it impossible to not know where the leading indicators are. The ideal is like a sports scoreboard—easy to glance and focussed on the one thing we are trying to do (score points).

My leading indicators for my business goal are the count of known readers and a count of known reviewers. Behind that I will have the list of names, but the scoreboard should just show the count. I will also make a goal that I can track against.

I already have the scoreboard for my fitness goal, which is just a spreadsheet tracking my lifts. I only need to track my last rep count and weight.

For the Spanish goal, I need to pick some number of repetitions that I think it will take to be able to listen to a podcast with full comprehension. I will have to just try over the next couple of weeks. Once I have that, I just need to track that number each week.

The fourth discipline is to build in some accountability. This is easier for the book’s intended use, which is for teams. The 4th DX is just to have a dedicated meeting where they make sure that the leading indicators are moving and that they seem to be resulting in the WIG. I will need some time to think about this, so I’ll probably take a detour in future posts and get back to it in a week.

Yesterday, I wrote about the first discipline from The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate]. In that post I set up three ideas for Wildly Important Goals for 2026.

By the end of the year:

• Business: Get my book to a stage where Amazon ads are break-even.
• Fitness: Improve 5 lifts by X pounds (TBD), while maintaining my body weight.
• Personal: Get to CEFR level (TBD) in Spanish.

All of these goals are easy to assess, but they aren’t a plan. In the 2nd discipline we try to define a leading indicator that we can work on at any time.

To accomplish my business goal, I need to improve my Amazon listing and find the right price such that it’s breaks even with the ad cost. To start, I will need to do a small ad spend just to see what my conversion rate is.

The easiest way to improve my listing is to get more reviews (aside: if you bought my book, please review it on Amazon). The best way to get a review is to ask readers directly, and to do that, I need to know who my readers are. So, the action I need to do is to write personal emails or LinkedIn DMs to people that have told me they bought the book and ask them to review the book. I will also use all my other marketing channels (e.g. this blog, my mailing list, Linked In, networking) to try to find my readers.

My fitness goal is just to follow Radically Simple Strength [affiliate]. I am doing the beginner plan and I have some time before this stops working. The leading indicator is my current max weight for 5 reps at a lift. I am doing the 3x/week plan, which cycles through the lifts. I should also make a nutrition plan to go along with this, but generally I have tried to eat cleaner and enough to support muscle growth.

For my personal goal, I need to just spend more time studying. I do DuoLingo, Fluent Forever, Mango, and my own Anki deck at various frequencies. But, I think that the main thing I could do to improve immediately is to listen to long-form beginner Spanish audio (like Dreaming Spanish) more seriously. I think my leading indicator would be to listen to one of these several times per week (the same one), at first with a transcript, and then over and over. The first few listens need to be focussed and undistracted (getting 100% comprehension), but later listens could be on walks, during errands, while lifting, etc.

Tomorrow, I will use these leading indicators in the 3rd discipline, which is to build a compelling scoreboard that tells you if you’re winning.

This is the first post in a four post series that will show how I implement The 4 Disciplines of Execution [affiliate] (4DX) for my aspirational goals.

The first discipline is to identify your Wildly Important Goal (WIG). In the book, the authors make a distinction between the “whirlwind” of activity that you must do to keep the lights on and a WIG that will in some way transform your business (or life, or whatever). I use their method to set a WIG in three segregated parts of my life: business, personal, and fitness. To find this goal, I use the suggestion of The ONE Thing [affiliate], which has you identify the ONE goal that makes all other goals easy or unnecessary.

A WIG is similar to a SMART goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) or an OKR (Objective and Key Result). It should be easy to assess if you have achieved them. For a sports team, a WIG is winning the championship, which is a binary outcome on a specific date, but not a plan. For a battalion, it might be blowing up a bridge. We might change plans all year to achieve these goals, but hopefully, the goal is stable.

For the past month, and until the end of the year, I am doing experiments that will help me finalize them. Here are my ideas so far.

For my business, I want my book, Swimming in Tech Debt, to have reached its next stage of growth. Right now, I am not concerned with maximizing profit, because the book is in the seed marketing stage, where my goal is to get readers that will be future recommenders (following the techniques in Write Useful Books [affiliate]). My 2026 WIG is to have left the seed marketing stage and to move into a stage where ads are break-even.

For fitness, my WIG will be based around strength. I started a training program in November and it seems to be working, but that’s normal for untrained people—early gains are easy. I will finalize the exact goal at the end of the year, but it’s something like X pounds of gain on five lifts (Bench, Press, Row, Pull Down, Squat) while maintaining my body weight.

For personal growth, I have a lifelong plan to learn Spanish. I haven’t settled on a WIG. The easiest thing would be to pick a CEFR level and then find an assessment. DuoLingo uses this, but I’d like to find a different source to assess myself.

Tomorrow, I’ll go through the 2nd discipline which has you find a leading indicator that you can work on each day and will build up to your WIG.