This year’s retrospective arrives exactly two years after the completion of his comprehensive Foundations project, an initiative designed to shore up the core habits supporting his daily life, work, and well-being. Reflecting on the aftermath of that undertaking, Young reported encouraging stability across the majority of the habits he sought to cement. He continues to maintain a nearly daily exercise routine. While a full marathon was not on the itinerary this year, he successfully conquered a grueling local mountain race that challenged participants to climb 1,400 meters of elevation over a 16-kilometer ascent starting from sea level. Beyond physical endurance, he noted general consistency in maintaining healthy eating and sleeping patterns, regular reading habits, and active engagement with friends.
Not all areas have seen permanent mastery yet, however. Young acknowledged some backsliding in personal organization. Nonetheless, viewing the challenge through a long-term lens, he noted that given his historically low starting point in organizational skills, it will likely require several more iterative attempts before those habits fully take root in his daily routine.
The dominant professional focus over the past year was the development and launch of the inaugural session of his new course, Everyday Energy. Researching and building the curriculum proved to be a deeply engaging endeavor. Having long maintained a fascination with the intricate connections linking human motivation, daily productivity, physical health, and overall well-being, Young seized the opportunity to author more than 75 individual lessons. This extensive undertaking provided an ideal excuse to dive deep into scientific and psychological literature on topics that might otherwise have fallen outside his immediate writing scope.
Looking Ahead: A Pivot Toward YouTube and Video Production
Turning his gaze toward the upcoming year, Young announced that his primary learning and creative project will be an ambitious push to produce higher-quality video content for his YouTube channel.
Long drawn to the medium—particularly educational video content that bridges intellectual rigor with broad accessibility—Young has historically admired channels such as 3Blue1Brown, Veritasium, and World War Two for their ability to captivate audiences while maintaining high educational standards. Despite this long-standing appreciation, his own commitments to video creation have previously remained sporadic and half-hearted. Video production demands significantly more time, technical overhead, and specialized skill development than traditional writing, creating a steep learning curve that he had never fully chosen to climb. Consequently, even though his YouTube channel has existed for more than a decade, his output as a video creator has remained inconsistent.
However, the broader digital ecosystem has undergone a fundamental transformation, with audiences and platforms increasingly favoring video formats. This macro-level shift has convinced Young that the time is right to commit seriously to mastering the medium and producing the kind of thoughtful, educational videos he has long envisioned creating. While he plans to share his new video projects via his email newsletter, he reassured his core readership that his traditional written essays will not be disappearing, ensuring that the text-based insights his audience has relied on for years will continue alongside his new visual ventures.
Personal Goals and Strengthening Human Connections
Outside of his professional ambitions for video production, Young’s personal focus for the coming year centers on maintaining and deepening the health and wellness foundations established during his earlier project. Physical health and fitness routines remain strong, though he is currently weighing the possibility of entering a new race. While a full marathon may not fit into his immediate training schedule this year, he is considering a half-distance endurance event or a triathlon as a compelling alternative challenge.
In his intellectual life, Young aims to cast a wider net with his reading list, time permitting. Because much of his reading is typically dictated by the intensive research demands of his current writing projects, he hopes to intentionally carve out space for books that do not feed directly into his commercial work. Naturally, given his pivot toward video creation, this expanded reading list will include several foundational texts on film and cinematography to aid his technical learning curve.
Another key area of personal reflection involves human outreach and social connection. During his initial Foundations project, Young identified his social outreach as an area that had grown somewhat weak. A stated priority for the upcoming year is actively making time for friends and family, even on occasions when maintaining those ties might feel less quantifiable or productive than professional tasks. He noted that the rapid emergence and proliferation of artificial intelligence in recent years has served as a poignant reminder of the irreplaceable value that flows through authentic human relationships—connections that must be intentionally nurtured rather than neglected.
Ultimately, Young attributes the sustainability of his two-decade career to the relationships he has built with his readers. Having written publicly for more than twenty years, he expressed deep gratitude for the opportunity to continuously learn, process, and share those discoveries with an engaged audience, thanking his supporters for sticking with him through another year of personal and professional evolution.
