When the last day of the year 2025 rolled in, I was not exactly ready to let the year go. It felt heavy. Not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet, weighty sense that comes from knowing that time once spent doesn’t return.

Looking back now, with 2026 already underway (it’s the first Monday of the year and my first full working day), I can say this with complete clarity that 2025 was a year full of excitement and adventure, failures and successes, heartbreaks and hard-earned perspective.

My elder daughter got admission, but only after a protracted legal episode/intervention/whatever else you may call it. As a family, it was a battle of nerves and wit for us. One that reminded me how much emotional stamina everyday life demands, even when the outcome is good.

Professionally, I came out of a famine phase. That alone makes the year significant. But it wasn’t a clean victory. It came with the realisation that survival is only the first step; pushing myself to the level I know I deserve will require sustained effort. Something that I will talk about more in a bit.

There were so many misses.

I did not publish a book. Again.

I lost a client I had worked with for the past three years.

My LinkedIn follower count stayed flat, yet my top two clients still came through LinkedIn—an interesting contradiction that says more about alignment than numbers.

There were also new beginnings.

I finally started recording videos for my YouTube channel.

I enrolled in an HR course because that has been an area of interest as well as practice for long. I am also 6X co-founder, and must have employed/managed 100s of FT/Temp/Part-time employees over the years. And I have been writing a lot about HR related topics over the past 4-5 years.

As 2026 begins, one thing is clear to me: this has to be a year where I return to the two things I love most—learning and writing. Somewhere along the soloprenuer journey, I became excellent at time-boxing for client and business work, but poor at doing the same for my personal projects.

I have realised that I need to start small for these two buckets. 20 or 30 minutes at a time. Then build up to one, two, maybe three hours of focused work. I need to start with a level of commitment I can realistically keep every day and then scale up from there.

Here is to publishing a few books in 2026.

Client-wise, I need a healthier mix.

Right now, the way I roll is this. I work with one or two large clients and three or four intermittent ones. Together, they meet my income goals, but it’s an unbalanced equation. No single client should account for more than 30–40% of one’s income. Otherwise, I may become overly dependent on these 1-2 clients, and then the balance of power will be skewed. Even if it’s just me who is aware of that imbalance, because it affects the way I handle and work with them.

The last few weeks of 2025 also saw me making Instagram reels. Call it progress. 😉

Health-wise, it was one of the better years. Just one flare-up that I can recall as of December 31st, which feels like a win. I credit that largely to walking—maybe not every single day, but consistently enough. May be 340 out of 365 days.

And then there was all types of physical and mental exercises I did – stretching, yoga, meditation and more.

And then there was AI. It changed the way I work, think and conduct my business, unmistakably for the better. I made it a point to learn its ins and outs. I read countless AI newsletters and articles—some I loved, some I disliked, many I got bored of—but I kept reading. The amount of knowledge available for free is staggering. The real challenge is not access; it’s attention and what you extract out of that freely available knowledge.

That said, honesty demands I add this too: despite all that reading, I couldn’t complete even 50% of the two courses I enrolled in. Or 10+ non-fiction books I purchased.

Learning, I’m realising, also needs structure and commitment, not just desire.

Now, with 2026 no longer theoretical but already in motion, this reflection feels less like a year-end summary and more like a checkpoint. Or better still, an accountability sheet for when I sit down to review my 2026 goals in last week of March.