Freed by 50

Happy New Year! We entered 2026 on a Thursday, so I can only hope that you kicked off the year with a four day weekend. It’s handy for mental states, but really tough if you want to start your health and fitness goals.

As we kick off this arbitrary change in date I’m thinking about my last post and how many of my 2025 goals were failures. I’m also thinking about how miserable I was in my job in 2025, and how I’ve been harping for years about living a healthier lifestyle.

With all of that in mind, this year I’m going to focus primarily on high impact, low effort changes that will create better habits. Those habits should lead to better outcomes throughout the year, and hopefully I can continue them indefinitely if they’re helpful. A good example of this is my morning workout time. Many years ago I dedicated 6:30 to 7:30 AM as my workout time, and I’m happy to say that with very few exceptions, I work out during that time every single day.

This year will feature a huge change in September, when my youngest starts Kindergarten. I have had at least one kid home with me for eight years straight. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to eat, shower, or leave the house whenever I like. Plus, someone wont be running from room to room creating messes all day. I’m going to miss the company, but I’m also not.

I just turned 47 and I’m really thinking about the time remaining. I know it’s lame and cliche, but if I lived an average American male lifespan I’d only have 28 years left. That’s 336 months or 17,472 weeks. To me that doesn’t sound like a lot. Considering I’ll spend about 1/3 of that time sleeping and a solid chunk of the remainder doing things I don’t want to do, I need to focus on spending my time well. That said, I’m really focused on spending more time appreciating the here and now. My wife and I are considering a lot more travel, and the possibility of easing back on our aggressive savings. That’s not to say that I’m going to miss my goal to be freed by 50 (he said it again!), but I think at this point I’m over saving and want to make sure I’m not putting my life on hold.

Ok, preamble over, on to the goals…or habits…or whatever…

Major Goals

It’s taken me a long time to realize that outside of goals like “Put X dollars here” or “Payoff X,” major goals are very hard things to achieve. Realistically, I can probably take on three maximum. I’m unlikely to lose 20 pounds, learn guitar, find a new job, train for a marathon, and become a youth lacrosse coach in a single year and do any of those things with the amount of intensity they deserve.

This year I’m choosing two broad, non-financial based major goals. Both allow for me to get creative, but also provide targets I can aim for.

• Find Meaningful Work…Anywhere – If you read this, it’s no secret that I haven’t been happy with my job, and that I’ve been conflicted because of the pay and benefits I get despite being unhappy. Poor little rich boy, I know. Still, we should all be seeking work that we find meaningful if we’re lucky enough to have the opportunity. My idea here is simple, if I can’t find a new job that affords me this opportunity, I’ll have to create the opportunity elsewhere. I recently spent a couple of days with my son building a new family hub app using Claude, and I had a lot of fun doing it. The chore tracker and ability to earn money has already had a huge motivational impact on my kids, and my son was obsessed with the process. I’m also going to take on an assistant youth lacrosse coach role in the spring, and I’m really excited to help teach these kids.
• Fix My Health – Yeah, yeah, lose weight, lift more, stop drinking so much. You get it. This time I’m really leaning into it, though. I’ve signed up for Function Health to get a solid baseline on my health markers, and hopefully some good news and advice after I do the tests. I’m also starting to address some nagging aches and pains that I probably shouldn’t have at my age. And yes, I’m once again doing Dry-ish January, which I’m hoping to continue into February in an effort to drop a few pounds before I go on vacation in March.

Minor Goals

This is largely cleanup work from previous missed goals. The first two are inevadible this year as they’re going to happen anyway. The last two are creative outlets I’ve been pushing to the back burner for over a year now.

• Reach the next stage of FI – Last year I missed this goal by about $40k. Given normal market returns, this could easily happen on its own this year. I’ll do my best to nudge it along.
• Pay off my car – I made the conscious decision to stay cash heavy due to uncertainty at work. Even though things have calmed down a bit, I’m going to hold off on making the final payment until my February bonus.
• Finally start the YouTube – It’s time. This is one of those “meaningful work” opportunities, too. I really want to help people by showing that you can make mistakes and still succeed. I think I have a good angle for my content, and I have enough topics for months of weekly posts. I also committed to this by buying a Yeti Blue microphone just to have some financial skin in the game.
• Write more – If I’m doing the YouTube content, this should go hand in hand. I plan to write up most of my topics and post here prior to recording anything.

Habits

This is going to be my real focus for 2026. At this stage of my life I want to be more present with people, more in touch with what’s going on in my head, and work on the healthy habits that 80 year old me will thank me for.

• Create before consuming – Whether its journaling, creative writing, writing for this blog, coding, or physically building something, my goal is to make sure that every day I am doing something creative prior to consuming any media. This is second to…
• Stretch and sunlight before screens – Generally I wake up around 5:30, pound a pint of water and then kick around the internet until 6 when I have some coffee prior to my 6:30 workout. I’ve had the same short stretching routine for decades, but I’ve been missing it a lot recently. I also like the whole sunlight before screens idea (even though most days the sun isn’t up when I wake up). With that in mind, at a minimum my first thing will be to complete my seven minutes of stretching with my Happy Light on. If I can at least get outside for a few minutes (hard to do in January in NY), even in the dark, it’s supposed to help. This shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes and I don’t think it’s a lot to ask of myself.
• No phone in the bathroom – I have an international team stretching from India to California and all parts in between. I run a 24x7x365 operation at work. I have three young kids and my wife is generally home with me while I’m working. I just need a little peace and quiet every now and then to collect my thoughts. What better place than the bathroom? This also plays into the whole theme of decluttering and consuming less, because I’m spending far too much time consuming YouTube and Twitter and not enough in my own head.
• Declutter – When I moved to my house we had a bedroom set, some tables and a couch. It’s thirteen years later and my house is bursting with stuff. I have two attics, a shed, a two car garage and a pool house all overfilled with clutter. I have boxes to devices I’ll never return, I have cables to things that are decades obsolete…it’s out of hand. And then there’s my phone, my laptop and my desktop. They need routine purging in order to simplify my life.
• Weekly weigh in and daily macro tracking – This is the simplest way to maintain healthy habits. I’m already working out daily, but I’m too loose with my eating habits. Tracking macros and focusing on protein has always worked well for me. Adding the weekly weight check will just be a reminder to stay on track.
  • Bonus – Lose ten pounds by March 1st. I’m going on a Caribbean vacation in early March and would like to feel good about myself walking around shirtless for a week. I’m not expecting miracles here, but I think this is a great forcing function to finally get noticeable results in a quarter.
• Journal daily – An even simpler way to make sure I create before I consume. Just sitting down after I stretch and writing a few sentences about the day before and the day ahead will allow me to say I did something productive every morning before even a sip of coffee.
• Meditate – There was a time I would do Headspace Take 10 every morning. I also had no kids and wasn’t managing a team. Now I struggle to find ten minutes of peace (see no phones in the bathroom). Again, this feels like ten minutes I can take away from puttering around the internet in order to improve my life.
• No food after 8 PM, no liquid after 9 PM, no screens after 10 PM – This is my version of the “10-3-2-1-0 bedtime routine.” Having no food after 8 would easily give me 12 hours of fasting every day. Not groundbreaking, but pretty good. No liquid after 9 means no booze too. I don’t often find myself drinking past 10 even on weekends, but it feels like a healthy habit to start. I also drink a ton of water, even at night, and it’s best I cut that out in the last hour before bed. As for screens, I don’t spend a lot of time on my phone before bed, but this will be a steady reminder to just leave it on the table. I only get 8:30 to 10:30 each day to watch TV, so I’m probably not cutting that out unless my wife goes to bed early, when I’ll just read until bed.

Despite scaling back on goals this year, this still feels like a lot. It’s really about staying healthy and keeping my head on straight. I hope you’re doing well with your goals so far this year. We’re four days in and that “no phone in the bathroom” thing is ROUGH!