Fire, By Design

I went quiet in the last quarter of last year. Not because there was nothing to say, but because I needed to listen more carefully to what the work had been telling me.

I unplugged over the holidays in a way I hadn’t in a long time. No planning. No polishing. No pushing insights. What surfaced wasn’t restlessness or boredom. It was information. A clear signal that I’d been spending energy faster than it could compound.

That matters. Because capacity isn’t the constraint at this stage of my career. Discernment is.

2025 was a year of frost. Not in the sense of failure or stagnation, but in the way cold clarifies structure. When conditions are tight, you see exactly what holds, what fractures under pressure, and what only works when everything goes right.

I spent much of the year watching where work broke down predictably. Where decisions repeated without being designed once. Where strong people were compensating for weak systems. Where effort created motion, but not durability.

That observation changed my relationship to impact.

For a long time, my default setting was contribution wherever it was needed. If there was ambiguity, I’d resolve it. If there was friction, I’d absorb it. If something needed stitching together, I’d do the stitching. That instinct built trust and it built results, but it also scattered energy across too many surfaces.

The quieter realization, the one that arrived only after stepping away, was this. Not all impact compounds equally.

Some work feels productive because it’s visible. Some feels meaningful because it’s urgent. But the work that lasts, the work that changes the trajectory of an organization, tends to be less loud and more architectural. It lives in decision rights, operating rhythms, governance, and design choices that prevent the same problems from recurring.

That’s the fire I’m carrying into 2026. Not urgency. Not intensity. But intentional heat.

Fire, when contained, doesn’t destroy. It transforms. It turns raw effort into usable energy. It creates momentum that doesn’t depend on heroics or proximity to power.

This past year reinforced that systems, not individuals, are what scale outcomes. I saw it in formal environments with titles and authority, and just as clearly in spaces without either. In places where the only way forward was clarity, structure, and shared ownership, good systems did what constant effort never could. They made progress repeatable.

So this year, I’m being more deliberate about where my energy lives. I’m investing in work that reduces cognitive load instead of redistributing it. In decisions that don’t need to be re-litigated every quarter. In structures that allow capable people to spend their time on judgment, not gymnastics.

This isn’t about doing less. It’s about designing for leverage. 2026 isn’t a restart. It’s a refinement.

Frost did its job. It revealed the brittle edges.
Fire now has a place to land.

And this time, the goal isn’t to prove capacity.
It’s to build what holds.