The Power of Your New Year’s Plan
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
Happy New Year! It’s been a month, and I’ve enjoyed reflecting upon the setting of 2025 and embracing the rising of 2026. I pondered why I am so motivated to start the new year, filled with hope. Why? And why do so many New Year’s resolutions die on the vine, despite our eagerness? I also got ‘rusty’ from not writing for a month, from using too much AI, which made me lazy in my thinking, but I have been so busy.
Why am I so busy? I asked myself. 2026 was a planned sabbatical year for me, where I could just ‘rest’ and do whatever I wished. I announced this years ago, but now that it is here, I am busier than ever. I am doing what I wish, but I am not ‘resting’ in the way I had imagined it. Just riding my bike, meeting with friends and family, travelling, reading, writing books, poetry, musicals, and movie drafts.
So I am pondering why, in my sabbatical year, I feel like this is my year of great growth. In my health, my entrepreneurial endeavours, and especially my faith. I desire the faith of Caleb, who was one of two out of 600,000 Israelites who came out of Egypt to enter the promised land 40 years later. What gave Caleb this great faith? I wish for a similar faith as Caleb.
Why do I need to grow? In health, wealth and faith or meaning?
The Law of Growth
Man is a growth by law, and not of artifice.
James Allen from “As a Man Thinketh”
He has set eternity in their hearts.
King Solomon (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
On January 1, the whole world clamours on a new morning—some still imbibed or hungover from the celebrations of New Year’s Eve—to a new day, a new year and a dream of a new beginning. A fresh start from a clean slate.
Gym doors open to new crowds and memberships, which later churn into obsolescence. New calendars are wiped away like an emotional solvent, dissolving the hardships of last year and bringing new hope for a better year.
This is the heart of every person in the world, including you. But it is more than a cultural or time phenomenon. It’s deeply rooted in your biology, in your soul and your being.
If you could observe any living cell, you’d see it busily living: metabolizing, repairing, adapting, renewing, replicating. It seeks to survive. But there comes a time when it must go. It is this battle of life and death in each cell. When it starts to decay, it ceases to grow.
This is what James Allen captures in his profound declaration: Man is a growth by law, and not a creation of artifice. Quietly ponder this statement. You must, by law, grow. Not by means of strategy or cleverness, deception, dishonesty… of artifice. What does it mean for you to grow? In physical stature? Financially? Intellectually? Mentally? Emotionally? Spiritually?
And King Solomon declares it even more wisely, that you have eternity in your heart. This struggle to grab hold of eternity, beyond time, while you live in this physical world in a physical body, there is something unseen that you must see and understand. Even if you obtain all of life’s possessions and comforts, these can not satisfy this longing for eternity in your heart. This is the ultimate growth… in your heart to obtain eternity.
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants
Resolve to perform what you ought; Perform without fail what you resolve.
Benjamin Franklin
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.
Isaac Newton
When people think about New Year’s Resolutions, they often think of motivation. I think of the giants who lived such amazing lives. They didn’t merely wish for a better year. They planned for a better mind. A better self. A better way of seeing the world.
Ben Franklin was the epitome of practical, virtuous transformation. Not because he was perfect, but because he was so intentional. He didn’t merely speak about virtues, but he treated them with precision, like a craft to be learned and practiced, measured and improved upon.
His famous list of 13 virtues was his private experiment to focus, measure and repeat. A way to design behaviour. Franklin called it character. James Allen would call it your garden of most dominant thoughts. Franklin practiced each of these 13 virtues, focusing on one per week. With 52 weeks in the year, he would focus on each for 4 weeks of the year in rotation. Wow!
Rather long, I think it would be good for us to ponder each of his 13 virtues:
Temperance: Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation.
Silence: Speak only what benefits others or yourself; avoid trivial talk.
Order: Have a place for everything and a time for everything.
Resolution: Resolve to do what you ought and perform it without fail.
Frugality: Waste nothing; spend only to do good.
Industry: Lose no time; be always usefully employed.
Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit; think and speak justly.
Justice: Wrong no one; do your duty to others.
Moderation: Avoid extremes; don’t over-resent injuries.
Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquillity: Be undisturbed by trifles or common accidents.
Chasity: Use venery (sexual indulgence) rarely, only for health or offspring.
Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
He lived his life with intentionality and lived quite a remarkable life full of 84 years as one of the founding fathers of America, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, inventor of the lightning rod, bifocals, stove, printer, politician, established America’s first library, hospital and fire department, writer, author and philosopher. Wow!
I wished to also remark upon the thoughts of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on this, but I do not have enough time, and this newsletter would get rather long.
Finding Your Meaning
Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.
Viktor Frankl
Frankl discovered something of deep insight as he lived through the terrors of the Holocaust. Human beings can survive the utmost suffering if they have meaning. Or they can collapse in comfort if they don’t.
Meaning is our soul and spirit’s oxygen. Meaning doesn’t activate cognitive ease. Ease, comfort, and luxury distract you from meaning. These can give you pleasure and entertainment, but they sedate and anesthetize your soul. You were built for more than mere survival and replication.
Abraham Maslow revealed this through his visual depiction of our hierarchy of needs. Once the basic needs are satisfied, there arise hunger, thirst, shelter, and safety not only for our physical being, but more deeply for our mental and emotional being, and later he discovered our need for transcendence, which I ascribe to the hunger and thirst for our spirit.
This is why people can look great and successful on the outside, rich and famous, but still feel deathly hollow and void inside. They’ve fed the lower basic physical needs abundantly but neglected and starved the more important needs of their souls and spirits.
Deep in our brain, in a part called our hypothalamus, is the ancient circuitry that ensures we fulfill two types of needs: survival and meaning.
For our survival, we seek and fulfill our hunger, sleep, shelter, tribe and sexual mate. It is deeply embedded and our default. It focuses on our physical well-being. It focuses deeply on the short term. It doesn’t care about meaning, fulfillment or legacy. It cares about now. Instant gratification.
But once these basic needs are fulfilled, the higher needs for meaning, purpose, and transcendence are activated. The rest of the brain, then, is alerted to plan, inhibit impulses, delay gratification, learn, reflect, and choose values over cravings. This is the battle between your higher and lower needs.
Who do you become? A person fulfilling the lower needs, and when is enough enough?
Or do you focus and become intentional on fulfilling your higher needs as well?
If you don’t train the “become your higher self” now, then when will you?
When will you look fit enough? When will you have enough money? More cars? More houses? More purses? More shoes? More clothes? More bicycles? More games? More friends? More followers? More …
My New Year Framework
There are only a few things that really matter in life. The rest is dressings.
Dr. Kevin Ham
I thought over the decades about what really matters in my life, and as I read the autobiographies of people I adored, I felt that some things really stood out. Faith, family, friends, finance, fitness, fears, fun, future, and education. As I am now 55, I like simplicity, as Franklin did. I’ve narrowed my own framework down to three main essentials: Health, Wealth and Meaning.
Health: our capacity to live and function to our full potential.
Wealth: our capacity to choose what would fulfill our full potential
Meaning: our capacity to endure despite hardships and setbacks, and to matter
And with each of these pillars, I train in four dimensions:
Physical. Intellectual. Emotional. Spiritual.
This is not just my philosophy, but my operating system.
Health is my energy, resilience, recovery, clarity, and calmness of mind.
Wealth is more than just money; it is my optionality, skills, judgment, and integrity.
Meaning is my responsibility, love, service, and legacy.
So, with health, wealth, and meaning in four dimensions, that gives me 12 dimensions. There are 12 months. 12 is a magical number. Jesus had 12 disciples. If each of them had 12 disciples, that would be 144. Add the original 13, and that makes 157, which is around Dunbar’s number, which is what he determined as the cognitive limit of how many relationships we could maintain. So we have a lot of capacity to do a lot, but 12 is the basic number to start.
I’ve advanced to the point of not only doing these 12 dimensions one pillar at a time. I’ve started to train like this is endurance training, month after month, year after year.
Sometimes you are running a marathon, one focus: running. One domino. Simpler and doable.
Then you can advance to a biathlon: running and biking, both in parallel. And then the next level is to do a triathlon: run Health, Wealth and Meaning, training at the same time.
The most advanced is the decathlon, a training program for 10 events. Wow!
I like to do the triathlon as I believe in training my whole being, my whole body, my whole mind and my whole spirit. Holistically.
Otherwise, if you only train a specific set of muscles, your body can get lopsided. Same with life. You can build wealth, as I have, but lose health. You can build health and lose meaning. A triathlon approach helps keep me balanced.
But to start, you should focus on your most constrained pillar. Right now, mine is the physical health of the eye and heart vessels. I am getting them to a safe level so I can focus on my next constrained pillar: my spiritual health. Meanwhile, I am still doing my Wealth pillar.
My Challenge to You: Your 30 Min Plan
Set a timer for 30 minutes.
Sit down with a blank page. Write one thing for each of the 12 dimensions below—one practice that, if it grew this year, would genuinely fill your body with energy, your mind with clarity, and your soul with peace.
Copy this:
HEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________
WEALTH
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________
MEANING / PURPOSE
Physical: ______________________________
Intellectual: ___________________________
Emotional: _____________________________
Spiritual: ______________________________
Then choose your training mode for January:
If life is heavy, run a marathon: pick one dimension and win it for 30 days.
If you’re stable, run a biathlon: two dimensions, simple and consistent.
If you’re ready, run a triathlon: one from Health, one from Wealth, one from Meaning—small reps, daily, compounding.
The goal isn’t a perfect year. It’s a year you became intentional. A year where the person you become by December feels like a quiet miracle. Built, not wished for.
My New Year Plan
And now I’ll end where I always end: with my own plan—my current “training block,” my first dominos, my triathlon set for this year.
Here’s my New Year plan:
Ah, I have to run to a lunch meeting, so I’ll continue this next week, along with my new year plan (not sure how many are interested in seeing my plan and if it might be helpful for you).
If you think it might, reply and let me know.
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You’ll find these articles insightful and helpful as well:
Life-Changing Question
Who do you wish to become by unlocking your heart’s full potential?
Next issue:
Implementing Your New Year’s Plan
Becoming Yourself as You Dream
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