Three firsts this year: Got officially married, bought a home, and went on a cruise. In fact, I wrote this post on that cruise!

In last year’s post, I mentioned scaling one business before expanding to another. It turns out scaling demands more time commitment, which forces me to sacrifice time elsewhere. My wife even complained this year that I am always too busy to spend time with her. This gave me pause and led to some introspective conclusions:

  • Time is our most valuable resource. If we do not spend meaningful time with those close to us, then they will be gone before we know it. At the same time, life is more than consumption or spending time with people. Satisfaction comes from achieving goals, and goals take time. Time therefore must be balanced between the two.
  • Not every income stream or opportunity is worth doing, even if it is accessible from a computer. The best measure of an opportunity’s worth is its value vs time spent.
  • Scaling a business leads to an increase in time spent. Some of this time can be regained by using existing profit to invest in tooling that saves time. This is often worth the expense even if it reduces overall profit margin, especially given the next point.
  • Some amount of time must be set aside for learning new things regularly. Without this time, one cannot learn new tools or have the time to self-build them.

This year, I felt the weight of my own success. What to do about it now is the question.

Multiple Streams of Income

One challenge I encountered this year is that industries are more dynamic than I imagined. I privately built a roadmap of how one could go from average American to increasingly higher socioeconomic levels, but what I didn’t account for was the issue that every business model must constantly evolve. I spent most of the year maintaining the model for one income stream rather than diving into others.

I now believe there are certain thresholds of scale for every business, though it isn’t clear where a threshold is until one has surpassed it.
In my experience, the process looks like this:

  1. Start a business, iterate through numerous key mistakes, and break even or lose money.
  2. Revise the business each time, fixing each key mistake, and slowly achieve greater amounts of profitability.
  3. Do something (or several things) that significantly increases the volume, which in turn increases both expenses and revenue.
  4. Identify ways to reduce friction and time investment by spending time automating some of those higher-volume things.
  5. Realize that even with automation, there is a portion of profit that results from investing more time than you would like. This is the point at which you can scale back to what the automation is capable of, even though doing so reduces overall profit. However, making this change improves the value vs. time spent ratio.

Moving forward into 2026, I plan to reduce my time investment in the one income stream I heavily focused on in 2025 to what my automation is capable of sustaining. The freed-up time will be allocated elsewhere.

Health & Fitness

Picture of our home gym as of 2025.

In one of my earliest end-of-year retrospectives, I posted about getting physically fit for practical rather than aesthetic reasons. In the past few years, I have lost my way by doing general weightlifting without clear goals. Designing my own home gym has forced me to revisit the purpose of at-home exercise.

As shown in the picture, our home gym doesn’t have any machines. My goal moving forward is to incorporate calisthenic exercises to further improve my physical capabilities, especially stability in uncommon positions. My hope is this will help me feel better connected to my body and also counteract the natural reduction in movements we experience with age.

In last year’s post, I also mentioned my wife and I would probably start rock climbing. Unfortunately, we have not been able to keep a consistent schedule with it. This is mainly because of house renovations, so we will see if we actually want to pursue rock climbing after the major ones are done or if we should cancel our membership. I don’t mind not utilizing our membership because the house we bought was, in our opinion, an amazing purchase. But if we do decide to pursue rock climbing, we will use a more flexible payment option.

Regarding my diet: The house purchase, move-in, and renovations have thrown off my eating schedule for the past few months. I had a month where I was losing a pound almost every week, so I hope to eventually return to the formula and resume losing weight.

Figure Skating

A touching and inspiring story of starting skate lessons as an adult.

I find it ironic that I am reviving this topic after claiming to sunset it last year. Our house is approximately 10 minutes away from my favorite rink in central Texas, so once we have finished major house renovations, I plan to schedule some workday afternoons to skate again.

Digital Creation (Entertainment Startup)

This was formerly a separate section where I share digital projects I am working on. I am condensing it into a single section now because what I missed most about my time working on Zems was being able to build an exciting video game with awesome people. I am still working on the unnamed warships project from 2022, but now my team of contractors has expanded to include a content author / writer. I meet with the team 1-2 times a week and the discussions we have are among my favorite parts of running a startup.

Mockup of the current visual direction for the game after countless iterations by the designers in 2025.

Travel

I previously kept this section near the bottom of the year-end post, but now that I have achieved almost-free travel, I have started to think more seriously about the places I want to visit and explore.

Fine Hotels & Resorts

If you read the heading and know what I am talking about, kudos to you. Tara and I previously focused on where we were traveling and what to do there without much thought as to where we were staying (usually a reasonably priced, highly reviewed Airbnb). Moving forward, we plan to maximize our FHR credits when possible, which means future blog posts will also showcase the stay location.

We have already booked some FHR stays for 2026 (including one in Spain). Next year begins a new stage in our travel journey where we pick vacations based on where we can use credits to make the stay and/or flight free, rather than the usual approach of picking a location and doing financial planning. This also means there are some credit-fundable locations we plan to visit solely because of their reputation (such as the Park Hyatt in Kyoto). This being said, there will still be occasional trips we book the usual way.

Now to share the places I visited in 2025.

Boston, MA and Chicago, IL

I’m grouping these together because neither was much of a vacation. The former was a corporate kick-off event where we were stuck in the hotel the entire time. The latter was intended to be a vacation (and my wife’s first time visiting Chicago), but I spent half the trip talking to mortgage brokers and trying to get the best deal without paying down points. As a result, I don’t have any photos from these trips, though the second half of the Chicago trip became fantastic after meeting up with an old friend. Thank you for the hospitality, Jacob!

Princess Cruise (Galveston, TX -> Mexico -> Honduras -> Galveston, TX)

This is the cruise I am typing this blog post on, and also my first time traveling on one. The ship is called Regal Princess.

View of the top deck.
Cruise services centers.
Central Atrium (3 floors shown).
Ship wake and foam.
As we were leaving Honduras.

Speaking of Honduras, we did a shore excursion there where we learned the process of making chocolate the old-fashioned (Mayan) way. Some pictures of Roatan (an island in Honduras):

Top deck of the Regal Princess overlooking a port in Roatan.
Wooden platforms with tin roofs in a rainforest in Roatan.

Entertainment Favorites

Show

We did not watch any TV shows this year.

Movie

We watched four movies this year:

  1. Us (2019)
  2. Sister Act (1992)
  3. Gran Turismo (2023)
  4. The Greatest Showman (2017)

Four is a small sample size to choose from, but I’m glad to pick Us due to its complex themes. I’m a sucker for films that inspire me to read debates and discussions afterward, and Peele’s sophomore production did exactly that.

Book

I read 10 books this year:

  1. The Laws of Trading: A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone (Lebron)
  2. Man Disconnected (Zimbardo, Coulombe)
  3. Following the Trend (Clenow)
  4. The Pro Retail Trader (Ruffley)
  5. Prop Trading Secrets (Lien, Crete)
  6. The Mental Game of Trading (Tendler)
  7. Giacomo Casanova: The Story of My Life (Casanova)
  8. Retail Options Trading (Sinclair, Mack)
  9. Trading in the Zone (Douglas)
  10. The Simple Truths of Service (Blanchard)

I will likely re-read Following the Trend at some point in the future, as the core arguments of the book are above my current capabilities. Among the rest, the best book I read this year was:

“If you can learn to create a state of mind that is not affected by the market’s behavior, the struggle will cease to exist.”

What surprised me most about this book is its deep analysis of human nature and belief systems. I remember reading Steve Jobs’s approved biography years ago and struggling to fathom how he could deny Lisa was his daughter while at the same time telling Chrisann, “Don’t you dare put her in foster care.” Mark Douglas’s section on the nature of human beliefs helped me connect the dots mentally, not only in Steve Jobs’s life but also in nearly everyone I know because each of us holds some number of conflicting beliefs.

Song

I heard this song periodically on the radio throughout the year, and it always made me feel better.

We also saw Hans Zimmer live in concert when he visited Austin in January 2025. It is the best concert I have seen.

Video Game

I played 4 new video games this year:

  1. Far Cry 5
  2. Lonestar
  3. Persona 5 Royal
  4. Breachway (Early Access)

Persona 5 is considered one of the greatest video games ever made (according to Wikipedia), so there isn’t much to say here. While some of the characters are shallow, the themes are deep and relevant, possibly even timeless.

Board Game

I played 10 new board games this year:

  1. Primal: The Awakening
  2. Soundiculous
  3. Ransom Notes
  4. Dead Cells
  5. Apiary
  6. Soul Raiders
  7. Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread
  8. Phantom Ink
  9. The Game of Wolf
  10. Tapple

There is a lot to love in this game. Each side quest segment is delicately crafted, and the game mechanics are well-thought-out despite them not being particularly deep. Additionally, the main story was predictable in its ending, which blunts the impact it could have had for its finale. However, we enjoyed the pop culture references and humorous dialogue interspersed throughout the story. From a role-playing standpoint, it’s one of the best RPG board game experiences we’ve had.

New Year’s Resolutions?

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions; I just make lifestyle changes on vacation because that is when I am away from my daily routine. However, this cruise happens to coincide with the end of the year, so I suppose I am making New Year’s resolutions.

  • Reevaluate my current scaled business using a “value per time spent” metric. I’ve already started trimming and reclaiming some time, but I will finish my review after I’m back.
  • Devote most of my free time in the last week of each month to R&D unless I am on vacation. I previously tried to devote a specific amount of time each day (usually one hour), but proper research operates on a Maker’s schedule, so I am now convinced Google’s Innovation Week might be more practical. This doesn’t mean I can’t use some free time before the last week of each month to do extraneous activity; it just means minimally booking that last week so I can get hands-on with a course, new tool, or code.
  • Be more deliberate in writing down ideas and what would be useful to automate. I can then use an R&D week to decide whether an idea or automation is practical, plus possibly sign up for an online course or do a free trial of a new tool to see if it can be done. I have already created a new note in my notetaker specifically for this.
  • Plan one vacation each quarter that lasts at least 4 days.
  • Shift my workouts from general strength to specific calisthenics skills. Less “lift to lift,” more “train to unlock specific movements.”
  • Block two weekday afternoon timeslots for figure skating, even during R&D week since exercise improves mental clarity.

Most of these are already in motion—as I said, I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because the best time to start is usually now. But I’m proud to have already built a strong foundation in the early stages of my adult life: An upward career trajectory (should I choose to continue that path), one scaled business, several early-stage ventures, minimal vacation costs, a growing video game startup, consistent weekly workouts with a personal trainer, and a house near an ice rink. Eventually, I’d like to add flexibility work and restart dance lessons—but I’m not committing to those yet. I’ve never been great at predicting where I’ll be or what I’ll want as I get older. All I can control is the foundation I’m building: Health, Schedule Flexibility, and Multipliers. That’s the direction, and next year will be another step forward.