Originally shared in our December 2025 Top of Mind Newsletter.
Why do most New Year’s resolutions fail by February? Because they are usually based on wishful thinking rather than data. Tim Ferriss offers a more rigorous, entrepreneurial alternative: The “Past Year Review” (PYR). Instead of vaguely hoping to “be better” next year, Ferriss suggests a tactical audit: review every week of your past year’s calendar to identify the specific people and activities that produced peak positive (and negative) emotions.
This approach turns life planning into a data-driven exercise. The strategy is simple but ruthless: take the “peak positive” winners and schedule more of them for 2026, while creating a “not-to-do” list of the negatives. For entrepreneurial thinkers, this restores agency. We stop hoping for a better year and start engineering one, using the data of our own lived experience as the blueprint.