Annual Review 2025 – Everything is Chosen

One of the hardest parts of writing this annual review is resisting the urge to have ChatGpt help me write it.

I’ve honestly never experienced that in all my time writing these and, as 2025 marks my eighth annual review, it’s a tough realization.

I consistently worry about trading my creativity and focus for productivity and pace.

And while I love using Claude and Chatty G for almost everything I work on, sitting down with nothing but a blank page to write this just feels… right.

Why write annual reviews?

2025 marks my eighth annual review.

Back in 2018, when I started, I wrote “The version of you that you’ll come to know in the next year, depends on it.”

And sitting here at 12:47pm on January 1, 2026, I can absolutely attest that I depend on this review process.

I took a few years off writing these and got back on the train last year, which I think is part of why 2025 was such an amazing year.

I set a pretty intense pace in my life, and especially in my work, so slowing down to review the past year is essential to staving off my “always on, always more, always up-and-to-the-right” brain.

The days are long, but the years are short.

And my time with my wife and boys is limited.

Which is exactly what makes it special.

My greatest fear is that I don’t learn the lessons provided to me by the part year.

This is second only to my fear of allowing my gratitude to fade and all of this become my new normal.

My current projects

• Growth Sprints – SaaS marketing consulting + advising & evangelism
• Growing Up – A SaaS marketing newsletter
• ALL IN – A career-focused community for in-house SaaS marketers

How I review my past year

Early on I broke things down into two sections (hustle – my work, and heart – everything else).

But last year I broke it down into the things that matter most to me:

1. Finance
2. Fitness
3. Family
4. Fun

And within each of those, noted the highlights and lowlights.

And you, reading this, need to make me a promise: don’t just read the highlights.

This isn’t Instagram.

It’s not my highlight reel.

I learn the most from seeing both sides of the coin and I hope will as well.

Honestly, I wish I had a better system for looking through the prior year, but almost all of it comes back to me looking at a few things:

1. All of my work call recordings
2. My notes app
3. What I saved on social media
4. My prior year’s calendar (travel, trips, calls)
5. My prior year’s journal (I use the native iPhone app)
6. Camera roll

Note: A big win for next year will be to improve my journaling. Only 85 logged in 2025 and I really want to capture all of the hilarity that exists in the garbage time of my life (aka the moments that make up my life – not just the highlights).

Finance

Highlights:

Travel. Adobe NYC (May), Highline (Aug), Content Marketing World – Speaking (Sept), Drive (Sept), Adobe Max (Oct). Travel this year was amazing, but I also had to say no to a few other trips because I built all of this to be closer to my family, not gone all the time. The FOMO is real and I get super nervous saying no, but it’s 100% the right choice. I’ve already said no to a few 2026 opportunities, knowing it’s the right move.

Income. We ended up doing great this year, financially. Coming in at 103% of last year’s total revenue (this doesn’t include day-job income prior to 2022 – the year I went full-time on Growth Sprints).

Closed-won clients lumped a bit more toward the end of the year versus the beginning in 2024.

Net-new qualified leads were about the same:

What that chart above doesn’t show is the dry spells of the year in terms of new leads:

Those are the parts of the year that test me the most and further reinforce my “this is normal” and “I can do this” part of my brain.

My sanity chart was pretty aligned with the previous year, albeit a bit stressful around September-October.

Building a house. In last year’s review, I was nervous about buying a house and frustrated that we hadn’t decided what we were going to do, especially in a wildly unpredictable/unstable economy. 

This year we said F-it and decided to do it anyway. The only thing I’d regret more than betting on myself and failing is being too scared to bet on myself. So we self-financed a ton of the house on our own *and* completed our dream home.

Offer design. It’s hard to see the label from inside the jar so this year I started working with a company called Duo on updating my offer and improving my sales process and service delivery. This is going to be a game-changer going into 2026 and will let me create a lot more of my own content, too (something I’ve wanted to do for a few years now).

Speaking. I spoke at Content Marketing World this year, hiring my friend Jay to help me in the process. Not only did we create a stellar talk, but also set forth my platform going forward. We created ideas and stories that are not just a talk, but can also be a book or something else larger down the road. It was amazing to really be pushed on my thinking and see inside the craft of public speaking.

Lowlights:

Bad-fit clients. In 2023 I took on one bad-fit client. 2024, I took on two. 2025? I took on FIVE. These are walking red-flag clients that I know I should say no to but I don’t because… money. These clients caused an inordinate amount of stress in my year and all have one thing in common – an overbearing founder with no marketers OR a weak solo marketer who was proxying the demands of an overbearing founder onto our engagement. I freaking knew better and still said yes. I can’t repeat this cycle or let it get worse going forward.

Fitness

Highlights:

Friendship. This is one of my biggest wins of the year. Truly.

I’ve started training regularly with two guys that I’ve trained often with in the past. But we’re getting excited about it in a really new way. We’re all getting much stronger (despite being 3 of the strongest guys in our gym) and exponentially more fit. We’re getting to the gym early to do extra training, signing up for events, and things like that.

Total volume. I trained harder and more often: 181 sessions (vs 159 in 2024).

I’m really proud of myself for pushing it after a slow start to the year. I travelled a lot at the start and by the end of Q1, -18 workouts YoY. That’s a whole month to make up and make it up I did, both in the summer and pushing through the start of winter. 

Consistency. I track all of my workouts on this big ass calendar and I made a commitment to myself at the end of March to take training seriously and to keep the streak going as long as I could.

Improvement. I’ve improved all of my lifts, kept my weight low, and feel like I’m right on the verge of having the level of fitness that I’ve chased for many years. Honestly more excited about training than I have been in a long time.

Tracking. I’ve started wearing my Whoop again this year and share my daily info with a few friends within the app. I started it mid-year, but the feedback I’ve gotten from it has been really helpful as I try to improve things like V02 max.

Family

Building a house. I mentioned this under finance but really it should live under every single one of these categories. Building/buying a home is one of the biggest decisions people make it their lives and we built this place to be a place to build community with our friends and family, but also to be a place for our kids to bring their friends as well. Last night we had a lot of our friends over to celebrate NYE and I saw a year’s worth of work and investment pay off.

Ear piercing. My oldest got his ears pierced. So I went with him and got one of mine pierced, too. One of my favorite privileges about being a dad to these boys is healing the parts of myself that I didn’t get to (or chose not to) express when I was their age. I’m so grateful for the freedom they have to be who they are while stepping into that myself (even in my 40s).

Same same. Same books. Same movies. Same hobbies. It’s such a joy to see the boys get deeper and deeper into their own fandoms, many of which are also mine.

Lots of quality time, trips

Coached a LOT of sports.

Concerts. Saw Linkin Park, Tyler Childers, camping w/ Rohan

Trips. This year we travelled to San Diego, Joshua Tree, balled out with box seats at a Laker’s game, skated Venice Beach (twice), Vegas for Dev’s birthday, Arizona and Vegas (again)

Fun

Met up with friends IRL. The nature of my work is that some of my friends don’t live around me. Which means hopping on planes to see them.

C2E2. Took my kids to an incredible comic and gaming convention. They’re old enough now to really enjoy it and it was a blast. We’ll do a LOT more of these going forward, especially with Gencon so close to us.

Sponsored my local baseball fields. In times of frustration, I pour into my local community. I can’t meaningfully affect where we are species, but I can definitely impact my local community. The whole point of making money is to have a positive impact on the people around me. So this year, I sponsored my local baseball fields. It’s not high ROI and I don’t have ROAS numbers for it, but I’m really proud of it and most importantly, so are my boys.

Warhammer. I loved this game growing up and we’ve dabbled in it a bit as a family, but this year we went all in. Warhammer, combined with building legos, has brought a LOT of fun bonding time for me and the boys and, honestly a lot of fun for me. As a person who has monetized every hobby he’s had for the past decade, it feels so nice to be able to build these little models with my kids. And if anybody cares, here’s the rundown:

• Me – Space Wolves / Stormcast Eternals
• Kid 1 – Death Guard / Ossiarch
• Kid 2 – Salamanders / Seraphon (loves anything lizard-y)
• Kid 3 – Astra Militarum / Cities of Sigmar (loves army stuff)
• Kid 4 – Skaven (he’s 5 and likes the rats)

Video games. I used to beat myself up a lot for doing anything other than work so spending significant time on video games (without the guilt) is huge for me. This year, I played a few video games I really enjoyed. Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 was amazing. Then GTA 5 (a full 12 years after it came out). Ended the year with Ghost of Yotei (I was skeptical but it’s a great addition of Ghost of Tsushima).

Lowlights

This administration. The daily barrage of intentional harm is just too much for me. I feel pretty deeply for marginalized communities and all the petty things this government has done to harm them on a daily basis makes it hard to enjoy life. From shutting down the LGBTQ teen suicide hotline, to normalizing Elon’s Nazi salutes, to removing the Spanish-language version of federal websites… nevermind all the big moves that have harmed our economy and the blatant human rights violations. I know it’s a distraction but it continually terrifies me to have such an obviously dangerous criminal in charge of things. 

3 Trends from 2025

1. The tension between growth and presence is becoming more intentional. I’m making harder choices about what to say no to: turning down travel opportunities, being selective about clients, protecting time with family. The work isn’t slowing down, but I’m actively choosing boundaries rather than just hoping they’ll appear. I built a house to be closer to family, not to be gone all the time. The FOMO is there, but I’m choosing it anyway.
2. Community as infrastructure. Honestly, this showed up everywhere: training partners pushing me to new levels of fitness, working with Duo to get outside perspective on my business, having Jay help craft my speaking platform, friends over for NYE in the new house, sponsoring local baseball fields. I’m not just valuing community in theory; I’m building my life around it in concrete, structural ways.
3. Permission to exist outside of productivity. Whew, if you know me, you know this is a hard one. Getting my ear pierced with my son. Playing video games without guilt. Building Warhammer models with the boys. These aren’t optimized for ROI or personal brand… they’re just for joy and connection. After years of monetizing every hobby, I’m sort of reclaiming space to just… be. Especially as a way of showing my kids they can be who they are too.

3 Lessons I’ve learned

1. I know what bad-fit clients look like, and I still say yes. What I’m learning is whether that’s an actual problem worth beating myself up over. Yes, I can and should do better in this area, but money is money and when you’re staring down the barrel of your president starting a war with Greenland and already making decisions that harm the economy, you get money where you can. That said, there’s a second lesson about respecting my own judgment enough to act on it, even when money is waving at me.
2. Consistency is a choice I re-make daily, not a personality trait. My fitness year makes this unmistakable. I fell behind early. I recommitted in March. I rebuilt volume, streaks, and enthusiasm. This lesson applies to business and creativity, too: I don’t need perfect conditions to stay consistent. I think the visible tracking and community helps a ton, too.
3. Healing myself through my kids is one of the best parts of being their dad. Getting my ear pierced at 40 because my son is getting his. Letting the boys dive deep into their fandoms. Building Warhammer armies together. In retrospect, I’m using their freedom to reclaim parts of myself I didn’t get to express before. The privilege of being their dad includes the privilege of becoming more myself.

One last thing…

Everything is chosen. This was hard for me to deal with for a long time because I was making choices FAR in advance on the outcomes they’d drive. 2025 (and 2026) won’t be any different. Everything you see in this review was a choice that I made with quite a bit of agency. Sure, the year felt extremely hard but I CHOSE that hard. 2024 was the first year that I didn’t beat myself up horribly in my review and I’m proud of 2025 as well. It truly does feel like I’ve made a massive mental shift that started a DECADE ago. While things are still spiky, they’re also all a choice that I make. This year, I’m pretty proud of my choices.