What I almost missed while chasing what I didn’t accomplish…

This is newsletter number 57. Fifty-two of them this year alone, without missing a week.

I almost didn’t notice.

Instead, I’ve spent the last few weeks mentally cataloging everything I didn’t accomplish in 2025. The goals I set in January that didn’t happen. The plans that stalled. The ambitions that turned out to be more aspiration than action.

Sound familiar?

There’s a concept called “the gap and the gain.” (Great book, by the way.) The gap is the distance between where you are and where you wanted to be. The gain is the distance between where you started and where you are now.

High achievers are gap-obsessed. We measure ourselves against the ideal and come up short every time. Meanwhile, the actual progress we’ve made sits there, unacknowledged.

My wife reminds me regularly: “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”

She’s annoyingly right.

When I actually stopped to look at the gain this year, here’s what I found: 52 newsletters without missing a week. A podcast launching in January. A book I’m actively writing over the holidays, not “someday.” Consistent LinkedIn content. Video content (which I hate making). A consulting business I helped grow while working full-time onsite with a client over the summer. Proactive research into what engineering leaders actually struggle with to make my coaching business that much more relevant.

And somehow, still showing up as a husband and dad.

That’s not nothing. I just wasn’t counting it because I was too busy staring at what I didn’t finish.

There’s a quote attributed to Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

52 straight weeks of showing up is a habit. Maybe that counts for something.

So here’s my suggestion for your year-end review: before you start listing what you didn’t accomplish, take five minutes to write down what you actually did. Not what you planned. What you did. Measure from where you started, not from where you thought you’d be.

You might surprise yourself.