I started 2026 with a simple plan: live more days worth repeating.
In the words of heavyweight champ Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth.”
The past few issues, I’ve been talking about the busy season towards the end of 2025. I knew I was running the engine hot.
When work piles up, I try to finish it all at once so I can finally relax. To get to days worth repeating more quickly, I end up stringing together a lot of days not worth repeating. Dumb logic, but I’m positive I’m not the only one who does this!
If you’ve ever pushed through back-to-back trips, no real breaks, somehow holding it together… you know what happens next. You get home, walk into your house, your body crashes, and you’re sick for days.
I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. After I got out of the hospital, I was sick for two more weeks.
I’ve been around a lot of hard-charging, high-achieving, creative people. Oftentimes, you default to being the engine rather than the architect.
You’re also too smart for me to tell you that you should delegate. (Yawn, you’ve heard this a million times already.)
So, a reframe I offer today: Are you living the kind of days that are worth repeating?
***
Last week, I drove up to Boston for a two-day event with one of the leading figures I trust in my life when it comes to AI.
One of the biggest things I loved about this event was talking about how each of us will individually choose how to live in a post-AI world.
My RAS filter clicked on, I immediately started to see things I wasn’t picking up on before. One very obvious thing: a new vernacular is coming into the mainstream.
Scrolling through YouTube on my TV, I laughed when I saw a music video titled:
“Human no AI lofi Music in a Real Poppy Field – Dreamy Drawing Session with our Pup”
The video is a young couple sitting in a field, the guy playing guitar while his girlfriend draws in her sketchbook and their dog rolls around chomping on treats.
The description of the video read: “Support human-made music. Help us grow and be an alternative to the never-ending AI slop.”
The video ran for over an hour (I let it run) and at the end, there was a note from the creators:
Thank you so much for being here and supporting us. Your love and energy keep us going and help us create a human alternative in a world overflowing with AI music. ❤️
“Human-made” is going to be a label, as if it’s a blue check mark on a social account from the Internet days of old. Like the USDA slapping their label on a packet of beef.
This isn’t a small thing! Artists are rebelling against AI (I love it). The human race is at a crossroads… and it’s crazy that I’m even saying “the human race.”
I can’t remember the last time I ever needed to use the phrase “human race” – but here we are already, trying to differentiate our species from AI in our everyday vernacular.
We are finding and feeling the need to mark what is real.
AI is the Ozempic of Thinking
Just over the weekend, I was at dinner with my old bosses (I’ve known them for 25 years – I’ve been to their son’s wedding and will be at their daughter’s later this year. They had a big party to celebrate the grand opening of their newest location and we ate, drank, and laughed deep into the night.
At dinner, their kids (by kids I mean people in their early 30s) were saying how some of their friends make nearly all their decisions through ChatGPT: what to eat, what to wear, everything.
They use it like Ozempic but for their brain. Our brains might not get smaller, but they might get smoother.
I’m a young Gen X-er and been thinking: here we are again, in the middle of yet another huge technological shift.
This is crazy, but I didn’t send my first email until my freshman year in college. I grew up with rotary phones, then speed dial, brick cell phones, and now people are talking to their AI oracle on a mini-computer in their pocket.
My peer group, young Gen X and older Millennials, have lived in-between some major bridges in tech history. Don’t get me wrong, I use a lot of technology.
But I think it’s part of our duty to blow the trumpet for the rest of our species: retain your humanity! Choose what’s worth keeping! We’ve seen both sides – while we were old enough to understand what was really happening.
Guardrailing Your Brain
Over the last two and a half years since ChatGPT came out, my consumption of physical books has gone through the roof. This wasn’t intentional, it was just something I noticed.
Like I did with social media years ago, I’ve started deleting all AI apps from my phone on weekends so I can actually unplug.
I’m putting guardrails on my brain… you know, that organ we physically carry in our head that’s pretty essential to our existence.
My personal take: AI should make me smarter. Not by using it for every little thing, but by freeing me to deeper activities with the time it saves me.
This includes making my brain stronger: Marking things up with a pen. Real writing. Sitting with ideas long enough that they change shape in my mind, in my hands.
I’ve been reading memoirs: ones written before AI came into the mainstream.
I’ve been pushing my closest clients hard about publishing books before everyone assumes you use AI. To use your voice so you don’t lose it…
To understand that the most important thing you can say is the thing only you can say…
To sharpen your ability to think clearly, speak with conviction. To opine, make a case, defend an argument, take a stance, read better books… and thus write better books.
These are activities worth repeating that make your days worth repeating.
I advise a lot of coaches and speakers, and I’ve kept things simple for ten-plus years:
Write things I would want to read. Consume things created through deeper craftsmanship, then create likewise. Create programs, offers, and experiences that I myself would want to buy from another person… then improve them.
Personally, if I saw someone selling their services and could tell nearly everything they put out was AI-generated, I probably wouldn’t work with them.
Would you? Would you buy an online course… created completely by someone’s AI avatar?
Your answer, yes or no, should guide your strategy. Seriously, there is no right or wrong answer.
Just know that you’ll probably attract people who answer the same way you do. So just do whatever that is, accordingly.
Learning About Monet’s Wild Life was a Great Day
While dancing around some of the health challenges last month, I made a habit of going to museums in New York City on Sundays. I am not an artsy, cultural person.
Museums and galleries make me sleepy, but I have this insatiable pull right now to see and stand in the presence of physical art and real architecture…to marvel at the things that human beings are capable of creating.
I’ve heard these names before, but couldn’t tell you the first thing about them. I saw some stuff by a guy named Renoir, and the work of some other guy named Monet.
I was going to ask ChatGPT more about them, but since I didn’t have the app on my phone, I just read the captions and displays at the museum. Monet – that dude was crazy.
His first wife Camille appeared in over 30 of his paintings, then she died young from cancer and he painted her on her deathbed. Art? Creepy? Both?
He later married a lady named Alice… who he’d been having an affair with while she was married to someone else.
After Alice died, he had a relationship with her daughter Blanche… who had also been married to Monet’s son! (Others believe the relationship was just that of a caretaker but… yea. Lots going on here.)
Anyways, he painted beautiful water lilies but his personal life was a dumpster fire. I found this utterly fascinating. It definitely would not have landed this way had I not gone there in person. (I’m also wondering if the AI Claude is named after this guy…)
I wrote that night in my Five Minute Journal that this was a day worth repeating.
I hope you’ll spend a bit of time to architect what a day worth repeating looks like for you. It’s a very human thing to do.
Free (for Now): Idea to IP Assessment
One pattern I’ve seen over the past decade: people who’ve been “figuring out their business” longer than they need to. That’s one kind of day NOT worth repeating.
I built something to help with this: The Idea-to-IP Score Assessment.
This is a 10-minute diagnostic across 8 categories that shows you where you’re strong and where there are opportunities to improve. You get a detailed, personalized report with 3-5 action steps based on YOUR stage of business.
This isn’t generic advice. It’s specific to where you actually are. The assessment is free for a limited time (available through the end of February).
Take the Idea-to-IP Assessment →
You might discover you’re more on track than you think… or you might realize you’ve been focused on completely the wrong things. Either way, you’ll gain some clarity on what to focus on next.