"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."
- James Clear
This week’s email is short and sweet.
I am a productivity nut. I’ve tried most of the usual approaches: New Year’s resolutions, 30 and 60-day challenges, habit trackers, all of it. They work briefly, but they tend to fail in the same way.
They don’t connect to the rest of your life. They aren’t aligned with a north star.
Goal-setting often exists in isolation. It doesn’t integrate with your long-term direction. When your goals aren’t tied to a larger mission, it becomes difficult to stay disciplined on hard days, because you can’t see how today’s efforts fit into the longer road ahead.
Over the past few years, I’ve been building my own system to solve that problem. I’d like to share it with you.
I credit this approach with some of the things I’m most proud of this year, including moving to a new city and starting this newsletter and corresponding YouTube channel. We closed out Year 1 with over 12,000 subscribers and over 400,000 views!
If you’re reading this, I’m really grateful to have you here.
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Design a year that runs on systems, not guesswork.
I put this entire process into a short, guided worksheet.
Get the Build a Bulletproof 2026 PDF
You can complete it in one or two focused sittings, digitally or on paper.
What you’ll do inside the worksheet:
Take an honest inventory of the past year (wins, failures, patterns, lessons)
Identify the fears and regrets that influence your decisions
Clarify what a “good year” would look like
Translate all of that into a simple execution framework
(Optional) Set up a personal 2026 HQ you can use as your digital second brain.
The outcome isn’t more to do, it’s less. No apps, no habit dashboards, no metrics to babysit.
Instead, you will sharpen your focus, strip away the non-essential, and redirect your limited time and energy toward the small number of things that actually move the needle and align with your north star.
This is NOT productivity hacks or New Year’s resolutions.
This is learning from the year you just lived, and using those insights to inform next year’s strategy.
When completed, this has a higher return on time invested than almost anything else you’ll do this year.
- Dante