The Model That Replaced My New Year’s Resolutions
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Audio Transcript:
New Yearʼs Perspective
Is one month into the new year, too late for a news resolution? And while I'm at it, can I just say, I'm just not a fan of goal setting. All right, we're just blowing it all out.
Welcome, this is the first podcast of 2026 here at Flourishing with Alex Reneman. And I do want to again, thank all of you who have been following along and enjoying this and collaborating with me on what to cover.
And today, just thought, hey man, here we are almost a month in, we're past the quitter's day and all the stuff that is talked about come this year, or this time of year with news resolutions and all of that.
And I don't know what kind of person you are. Many years I've been all about resolutions, I get my list, I'm ready to rock.
The moment that, you know, I burn something in the fire on the 31st and the moment that hits the 1st, I'm ready to be a whole new person.
And I don't want to make fun of that because any time I think any of us can take a moment and try to have a new beginning, hey, I'm all in, man. Push chips to the middle of the table, go at it. I'm here to support you.
But for me, what I found over the last several years, I actually looked at December as my new year.
And I did that for a couple of years, not just to be a schmuck and say, I'm starting my new year before you, but really so that I could kind of get things in motion and stumble and fall and all this kind of stuff.
So really by the time the first of the year hit, I was kind of already in the motion, already doing some of those things. And that was a valid strategy, and I still probably would go back to that. But this year, I just wasn't quite ready.
I gotta tell you, I was trying to get through that. And you all know if you listen to this long enough, I'm a seasonal guy. I think about the season, not always in the natural seasons, but sometimes, but rhythms and all those things.
And this year, I needed a season of chill. I was in the winter, let's hibernate a little bit.
Not entirely, but I did a lot of cooking, a lot of thinking, not cooking food, just cooking in my brain about what it is I wanted to be and do when I grow up kind of thing in 2026.
And so that kind of hibernation time and thoughts was really valuable. But I landed on something a little different this year, and I thought, hey, why not share with you guys? And you can decide how that sounds against what you do.
And maybe you can make fun of me or learn something or whatever else. And so, yeah, here we are.
December Reflection
So this year, I took that time to hibernate in December, if you will. A lot of family time. I took a couple of weeks off at the end of the year.
It was great. The rest of the team rallied around. It was awesome to be able to do that and just be dad.
So, you know, founder, father, friend. I mean, I was just I was father and friend. I was very little founder except some thinking, right?
And some writing, some strategic writing and such, but no real operational engagement. And that was huge for me. So in addition to that, I really kind of took it easy on myself and said, OK, let's let's get those.
Twenty five was a hard year of physical engagement, trying to get healthier and do the things I needed to do to be the best me. And, you know, we do this stuff all the time. But twenty five for me was a real investment year in that.
And I kind of took the months to just really relax some and get ready for twenty six. And here we are.
And so now we're a month in and you've all read, you see the highlights or the stories on Quitters Day, a couple of weeks in, everybody's quitting for the most part their New Year's resolution or all the gyms empty out by February, all the things.
And those are fun and people can make fun. But, man, it's hard to create new habits. And I think it's also arguably hard to do it at the first of the year for all kinds of reasons.
So I'm here to say, man, do it when you need it and when you think it works and how you think it works. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't, do it another way and try it then.
And so, yeah, great. We could kind of roll in with the wave of January 1, but at the same time, it's just as simple to do whatever you use. So here it is, January 20, whatever, whenever you're listening to this, let's give it a go.
So here's what I took into. I felt a need to redesign my days as founder, in my founder role, in my work role. I found a need to redesign those days for all kinds of reasons.
What wasn't working is, and I think I talked to you guys in an earlier podcast, I was kind of being, it's popular to say reactive versus proactive, but I kind of was.
I was much more responsive to what was happening and less strategically proactive and acting on my environment. And that's weird. I guess sometimes you get caught in those cycles, and that's where I was.
And as we as it was kind of ending out the year, and we had a heck of a second half and a fourth quarter in a December at Mountain Leverage, it was awesome to see everybody come together.
And it really gave me a moment to just pause and reflect, how can I be a better CEO, a better founder in my role for our customers, for our partners, for all the stakeholders, and certainly for our employees and for myself and for my family and my
community, you know, kind of always, right? I connect everything and try to walk this line of anything in life and acting like it doesn't impact, you know, everything you're into. So it just felt right to me.
It was about doing more, to be really, really super clear. It was about doing more. It was about designing, you know, having my days more designed to make Flourishment more likely.
What I really focused on is I'm looking at the world around me, and we can talk about this and probably should more on the podcast. It's just this AI acceleration, man, coming, coming, coming.
And it's coming after all of our businesses and all of our lives. And there's opportunities for us to take advantage of that, as we've talked about. But my leadership load in 26, I think, is pretty significant.
I looked at what's going on with my family, you know, with my kids kind of growing to certain ages, you know, in teenage years and those kind of things, and the relationship with my wife and growing that over 25.
Again, health, now, you know, it's non-negotiable as a foundation. It's not a side quest, man. It's the main quest, and I got to make sure I'm on that path.
And then, ultimately, you know, finding in 25, you know, hitting a lot of the limits of that willpower-based systems that a lot of us put in place, and they're okay for times and whatnot.
Habits and Direction
But I was listening to a podcast, and I don't often get to very many of them, but I, whatever, the universe provided. God laid a podcast in my hands. However you want to look at it.
You know, I listened to a Huberman podcast that talked about habits. It was a great episode. It was one of those short ones.
I mean, it's not the four day ones, the day long ones that he's got. It's a short one, and I was able to kind of listen to it. It was just a couple of things really struck me about it.
And if you've ever listened to him, he goes, you know, it's the science. It's all about the science and the data. And I love that.
And that gives me a chance to then say, well, how do I feel about that? And what can I apply for me? And in this one, it talked about, you know, habits forming around biology and timing, not necessarily motivation.
So that idea of, you know, what does your mornings look like? And is that the chance to install habits in different phases through the day? And all that stuff's really cool.
And you'd be benefited, if this is even interesting to you, to go check that out. I'm not going to regurgitate the whole thing. I'm not qualified for it.
And that's probably boring anyway. But this idea of going over these cycles and replacing habits after failure, instead of looking at failure and then whatever, but like the moment you fail, then you add the habit.
And that creates this cycle, this up cycle, which is really cool. So instead of super relying on prevention, you begin to rely on this up cycle. And I just, I love that.
And another theme that I really dug into is designing for imperfect days. So again, I'm not going to go through all the episodes. You should do it.
It gave me some language and permission, candidly, to kind of shape this next level of system for me. And again, for you, there might be lots of different things. Maybe you're a great goal setter.
I struggle with goals. But what I don't struggle as much with is knowing who I am and setting direction. So I'm a directional goal setter, if you will.
And that's how I look at goals. Like I want to make sure I'm moving in a right direction as opposed to I'm going to do this thing, because I don't really know what my limits are.
And so sometimes I set a goal, unless I see it as a waypoint for the next goal, in a directional way, I might only get so much potential for what I can really accomplish.
The other side of that is I may put something so far out there as demotivating when I struggle to get there. So directional for me is always the win. And again, for me, your mileage may vary.
MVP Day Concept
But one of the really key things that I put in for this next cycle is a notion called MVP days. And I'm kind of double on turn to here. So there's no such thing for me anymore as good days and bad days.
It's every day is an MVP day, it's just what type. So MVP, we know those from either most valuable player, minimum viable product, all this kind of things. Well, for me, it's both.
So if I have an awesome day, and that's what I'm shooting for is an MVP day, yay, MVP day. But at the same time, I have a fallback.
So let's say travel is in the way, there's all kinds of things that we have in our lives that wreck our days for one reason or another.
Now, we can be more deliberate and disciplined about making sure we have less of those, but they still happen, life happens. And so when that occurs, as opposed to feeling down, or I missed the streak or whatever else, I just say, that's an MVP day.
Well, now, that's a minimum viable productive day. And so now I've done, I make sure I do the minimum of things that I say, this is key, these are non-negotiable, got to do these in my life. And so MVP day, yay, MVP day, yay, right?
It works out either way.
Daily MVP Habits
So anyway, for me, I really look at three things for my daily MVP, and that's physiology, direction and closure. I want to make sure I've got the right energy for my day, so I can bring the right energy as a founder, as a father, as a friend.
And at the same time, that direction, I want to make sure, like I mentioned, I don't want the world driving me or stimulus driving me. I want to be deliberate. And so agency, I want agency.
So I'm thinking about energy, agency, and then I really struggled. The last half of the last year was sleep, and the quality of sleep and the recovery. And so that felt really important to me right now.
So if I can protect those three, energy, agency and sleep, tomorrow is more likely to be an MVP, a most valuable player day, as opposed to a minimum viable productive day. So anyway, that's a key aspect of what I'm doing going forward.
Just really a core insight for me. And I think it probably resonates with a lot of you. Maybe not, but for me, it really, really hits deep.
So what is an MVP mode? So on days that are completely full of chaos, and maybe I can see them coming, and I go and say, look, this one's going to be an MVP day all the way, I'm ready to go.
Maybe it's travel, it could be emergencies, it could be health disruptions, all kinds of things happen in our lives. And I literally say it out loud, today is an MVP mode day. It's just MVP day.
And that kind of gives me some permission. And you could, look, obviously you could say, well, is that going to create where every day is going to be MVP day? Well, I don't know, man, maybe.
But I think you're listening to this podcast probably because you're out there doing your thing and trying to find ways to be a better you in whatever way.
And that's a low risk for me and probably for you that I'm not too worried about all of a sudden end up on the couch every day in my underwear playing PlayStation saying this is MVP day. I mean, I want to do stuff. I want to accomplish things.
I want to be the best I can be. But so my challenge is more giving myself the grace to say, hey, today's MVP day. So that's really important.
And in these cases, it allows me sometimes to pre-decide the day, which is awesome. So I don't always feel like I'm caught off guard. It removes that guilt, and it gives me this continuity.
So I'm still going. It's not about the things. I've hit the, I've just never been, I've tried the streaks.
Like it's hit the streaks, and I get it. And there's value and all that. But if I miss a streak, I take it hard.
I take the loss. I take the L big time. And I don't like it.
So by removing that guilt, I'm able to keep forward progress, which is really important to me. Again, that directional progress. So the continuity is there.
And I love that. So my habits, I'll just give you. So what I did is I put kind of six habits around this directional thing.
And only a few are really those MVP ones, right, that we talked about.
And I won't go into the details of what they are, but really one is just kind of a morning movement, getting that energy, getting hormones, all those things connected to set the day on the right edge.
And also one thing, like if I do this today, today is a win. Now, none of these are going to be earth shattering. These are going to be like, well, yeah, of course, but I'm really doing it.
I'm not just starting the day up and letting the day run me in whatever else. In fact, I'm not even looking at email, Slack, all the things, texts. I'm not looking at any of that until about 1030 in a day, and I'm up early.
And so it gives me a chance to really drive my day. I have one really deliberate, like micro moment connection with somebody in my family, could be my wife, my kids, you know, family, whatever it may be.
I'm really, I'm focusing in on having that moment, a deliberate moment where I am proactively connecting with them. And then, you know, there's some health maintenance there in terms of what I'm doing with my movement, with my eating.
There's some habits around that. And then lastly, and this one's an important one, and this is part of that MVP day for me, is all about closing out the night. And so making sure I'm downshifting.
You know, there's all the things we, many of us do, like we don't eat too late, and we're trying not to, the inputs after a certain time, those are important, but also just a deliberate downshifting, maybe some breathing, reading, stretching,
whatever it may be, downshift out of there. And again, I don't try to do all six of these every day. I mean, they're there, and if I can do it, fantastic. I aim for four or five, and worst case scenario, I grab three, and that's an MVP day.
So it's, you know, and I've been doing this now for a little over a month, or just about a month, and I found some really, really big wins.
Results and Learnings
I mean, my sleep score and my HRV, my heart rate variability that tracks the gaps between your heartbeats and all this kind of stuff, it's a good measure of, are you recovering? Tracking those, I've seen those begin to rise.
You know, the sleep score first, and your HRV seems to be tailing up with it, which is awesome. I do, I am absolutely dialed in at Mountain Leverage in a way I haven't been in a while.
Not that I haven't been cranking and working and doing things, but just being able to be deliberate and not have that task switching. So this is another thing I changed in, in our model. We have, our mornings now are pretty quiet.
They're quiet mornings. And that's hard to do when you have a global company and everybody's running. So it's not, it's not going to work for everybody.
And this is always a challenge anytime you're trying to put something together. But for me, again, I'm up in the morning. I have my, I do my morning ritual.
As the older I get, the more I love rituals that I never really appreciated as a young man. And then I really don't get into the rat race. I don't anything until mid morning.
And at that point, we built some summaries to come that I can get a hold of in the mid morning, mid afternoon.
And I don't bounce back and forth between what I'm doing and email or what I'm doing and Slack or whatever teams, if you've got that stuff, whatever. I'm staying out of that.
So the context switching, again, nothing earth shattering here, guys, but the context switching that was happening throughout my day, I had no idea really. I thought I had it figured out. I had no idea how much it was pulling away from my energy.
And so by eliminating that throughout the day, whoo, that, you know, by the end of the week, I'm still ready to rock. Where's, let's get the next week going. I'm ready.
Whereas a lot of last year, and certainly the second half, I was come Thursday, you know, it's like you got to guess, right? And so again, I don't know what your situation is like, but that was huge for me.
Your job role may need that constant engagement. And so that's your job. And that's different.
My job is not for that. And now if you need me, if something's going on, people know how to get a hold of me, they can raise the alarm and I'm in. I'm happy to do that.
But that shouldn't be a daily, every hour constantly throughout the day kind of thing. And so I've been deliberate about that. There's some things I've not done so well, right?
The days I've learned that if I really don't get some of these things knocked out in the morning, I don't have the, things just get swept up. They just get swept up in the day.
I don't have the willpower, you know, Huberman calls it a limbic friction. I think that's a phrase he came up with. I like it.
It just says, look, you have more motivation to do something earlier in the day typically than you do later in the day. But there's certain things that you're always kind of ready to do. And there's certain things that are always kind of tough to do.
And you want to find the right times to get to do those things. So there's less friction, less limbic friction to be able to do this or shape them in a way. And so there's all kinds of science around that.
We won't get into that on this one. But anyway, it hasn't been perfect, but I can tell you the MVP feature and really the minimum side versus the most valuable side has been magic for me.
I don't want to say I've lowered my expectations, because I still expect to kick butt every day, and I expect to kill it. I wake up in the morning, I'm ready to take over the world.
But being able to have a second path that still gets me forward and progress without feeling like a loser and without being a loser, that's huge. So I think the win here isn't quite consistency as much as it's trust.
It's trust in that progress for me, trust that I can continue to move forward.
Making this all usable for my benefit, for my progress, as opposed to making so prescriptive that I'm now yet again another slave to a list of things that maybe I put together or somebody else. But I'm able to kind of just move through life.
And it's been cool. You know, so if this resonates with you, don't just copy my stuff. I mean, you can, you can try it.
But I'm not sitting here telling you it's best for you, or even for me for that matter, but it's working and it's a little different. You know, it does look more like a New Year's resolution that I'm following through.
But there's some nuanced differences that are working for me. So I'd say steal the principle all you want. Design, you know, your worst realistic day.
And is that enough? And what does that look like? If you had to kind of skid along the bottom in a day, what still makes it an MVP day?
You're still getting your minimum viable productivity day. And that MVP is a play on words. It's not all about productivity.
It's about the connection and love that you share with those that are close to you and all the things, whatever is important to you, right? How could you get that minimally in a day and still get over?
That's not the target, but it gives you that fallback. And it's pretty good. What are your three non-negotiables, right?
What are your three things that just have to happen in a day? And I say all this to say maybe it's not daily for you. Maybe there's a weekly thing you run.
Maybe it's every couple of days. Maybe you only do something X number of times a week, whatever. That's just a little harder for me to manage, but may work better for you.
And I've tried those things in the past that may work well.
So anyway, I think as I look at all this, and I'm blabbering on now, and I'm happy if you guys have other questions, and lots of times after these, you come back and there's some Q&A, and I'm happy to engage on any of this and share openly what I'm
doing, and what's working, what's not working. doing, and what's working, what's not working.
Flourishing Alignment
But I think the thing I'll leave you with is what has really come to my mind over this, is flourishing in this phase. It isn't about intensity for me right now.
It's about alignment over time and that progress of continually re-committing and re-connecting and moving forward with my flourishment path. And that's been cool, man. So yeah, that's been my January.
So I'm not quitting. I've not hit quitters. I'm also not having to completely re-commit because I've just continued to be falling forward.
I'm making progress every day. In the days that are just minimum days, man, the next day is still, I've still made progress. And that's just important.
So I hope that's helped to you. And again, if you've got any questions, you've got comments, thoughts, I'd love to hear them. If this episode is valuable to you, I'd love it if you thought it'd be valuable to somebody else.
You shared it with them. I love the community we build here, and I love the feedback you all have given. And again, hopefully you enjoy the video.
This is cool. My buddy Luke, he's also a listener. He designed, this is awesome.
This is my hometown. All kinds of things going on. Maybe we could talk about some of that stuff later.
I'm kind of excited about some of the stuff. It all means something to me. But yeah, hopefully the video is better.
And if you're not listening to the video, that's cool. You can still, the audio will still roll in, just the same. I'm still using all the same mic and everything else.
So anyway, with that, it is not too late. Let me confirm to you, it is not too late for you to set your New Year's resolution or whatever resolution.
And hey, if you don't want to set goals like everybody else, but you want to set some directional stuff or some progress goals or whatever you need to make, do it. Set it, whatever it is for you to flourish. That's what I want for you.
So anyway, hope that your new year has kicked off well. We're about to hit February here, second month of the year. We're already rocking and rolling down year 2026.
Thank you all for all you've done in this podcast and I look forward to hearing from you. Have a great week and wherever you are, I hope that you are flourishing.
Alex Reneman is the founder of Mountain Leverage and Unleash Tygart and host of Flourishing w/ Alex Reneman. For 20+ years he has worked as CEO of Mountain Leverage, honing the concept of flourishing and experimenting with it in the business. In July of 2024, he decided to begin to share this idea with others, which led to his podcast, social content, and the plans for other initiatives in the future.
