Everyone’s planning for 2026 right now. Setting goals. Picking words of the year. Making promises to themselves that feel significant.
But I feel that a one-year planning horizon is a trap. Not neutral. Not helpful. Actively harmful.
It’s the Goldilocks zone of self-deception, and it’s costing you more than you realise.
The Perfect Self-Deception
One year is long enough to feel like long-term thinking. It satisfies the part of you that wants to believe you’re being strategic, playing the long game, thinking beyond next quarter.
But it’s also short enough to avoid real commitment. Didn’t hit your goals? No problem. “Next year will be different.” The calendar resets, and so does your accountability.
This is the trap: the annual cycle creates the illusion of planning while optimising for abandonment.
Think about it. A year is neither tactical enough for real execution nor strategic enough for real direction. It sits awkwardly in the middle; too long to maintain urgency, too short for anything meaningful to compound.
It’s ambitious enough to feel meaningful. Forgiving enough to fail without consequence. The perfect escape hatch disguised as a commitment.
The Two Timescales That Actually Matter
Real progress operates on two very different timescales:
- 90-day cycles. Short enough to maintain urgency. Long enough to see real output. You can’t hide from a 90-day deadline. There’s no “I’ll start in January” when January is the deadline. Quarterly rocks, focused sprints, concrete deliverables. This is where execution lives.
- Decade-long compounding. This is where everything valuable actually happens. Relationships. Reputation. Skill mastery. Wealth. Health. These don’t move in annual increments. They compound invisibly over years, then suddenly become obvious.
The year sits awkwardly between both. Too long to execute with urgency. Too short for compounding to reveal itself.
Naval put it simply: “The direction you’re heading matters more than how fast you drive.”
Direction is a decade question. Speed is a 90-day question. Neither is a year question.
Direction Compounds. Achievements Don’t.
Here’s where people get it wrong every December.
“What will I accomplish next year?” is the wrong question entirely.
Achievements are discrete events. Winning a deal. Hitting a revenue target. Launching a product. These are moments, not trajectories. They don’t stack. You can’t compound a list of accomplishments.
But direction compounds. Becoming the person who builds. Who shows up. Who plays long-term games with long-term people. This stacks. This is what creates the life you actually want.
The year-end question shouldn’t be “Did I achieve enough?”
It should be: “Am I pointed at the right things?”
Paul Graham nailed why this matters: exponential curves feel flat in the beginning. We can’t intuit compounding. So we look at one year of progress and mistake the flat part of the curve for failure.
The year lies to you twice. First, it makes you think you’re planning when you’re really just procrastinating with extra steps. Second, it makes you think you’re failing when you’re actually just early.
So as everyone around you sets their 2026 goals, ask yourself a different question.
Not “What will I achieve?”
But “What direction am I compounding in?”
Because a year from now, you won’t remember what you accomplished. You’ll just be whoever you were becoming.
