My 2025 in Review
my quick look back at 2025
This was a quiet year for newsletters.
I published 17 posts, the fewest I’ve written in a long time. That wasn’t because I ran out of things to say. It was because 2025 asked me to listen more carefully, especially to myself.
I spent much of the year walking north on the Pacific Crest Trail. Long days. Simple rules. Repeated decisions. When you strip life down that far, there’s nowhere to hide from your own patterns.
Some quick stats:
I walked 2,655 miles (4,270 kilometers) - not including side trips to summit Mt San Jacinto, Mt Baden-Powell, and Mt Whitney
I took just under 7.2 million steps
It took me 145 days from start to finish
I took 10 “zero-days" - days where I didn’t hike any miles
My longest day was 33 miles
What surprised me most wasn’t what I learned about hiking. It was what I learned about myself. More on that later.
Before the Trail: Restlessness Without Language
The early posts of the year were circling something I couldn’t quite name yet.
Puzzling, False Secrets, and When Up Is Too Much all pointed at the same discomfort from different angles. A sense that forward motion had started to feel compulsory instead of intentional.
The Tired Weasel made that tension visible. Burnout didn’t arrive as collapse. It arrived as accommodation. I was adapting well to things that probably deserved more resistance.
By the time Walking Away appeared in April, the decision was already made internally. The writing just caught up.
On the Trail: Fewer Explanations, Better Signals
Hiking stripped away my favorite coping tools.
There was no calendar to optimize, no audience to satisfy, no productivity story to maintain. There was just weather, elevation, effort, and recovery. And a lot of time to notice how I reacted when things didn’t go as planned.
Weasel On Trail was written from inside that simplicity. The trail doesn’t reward confidence. It rewards attention. Miss a water source or ignore a small ache, and the system corrects you quickly.
That lesson stuck.
After the Trail: Growth and Insight
I’ve had a few people tell me that my post-hike posts hit heavier. The posts after I returned carry more weight because they had to.
I was no longer theorizing about change. I’d lived through one. The Long Trail Back and The Best Version of Me weren’t about reinvention. They were about integration. What to keep. What to let go. What no longer needed defending.
Leadership showed up again, but differently.
When Confidence Meets Vulnerability, The Quiet Power of Caring, and The Leadership Practice of Noticing all came from a clearer place. Systems drift quietly. People adapt quietly. The cost shows up later, unless someone is paying attention early.
That’s not just a leadership lesson. It’s a personal one. In fact - those who know me closely know that I’m writing as much about my leadership ideas and philosophies as I am about my own personal beliefs, challenges, and struggles. Often, I figure things out by writing - and I’ve had a lot of things to figure out recently.
Ending the Year With Direction, Not Certainty
The final posts of 2025 pulled everything together.
Quality Is a System and Chasing Predictability echoed what the trail teaches every day: outcomes emerge from behavior, not intention.
Slow and Steady turned out to be the thesis statement for the year, even though I didn’t know it when I wrote it.
Leadership Is a Constant Experiment and finally, Signals in the Noise closed the year by naming the real work ahead. When nothing is obviously broken, the signal you’re looking for is usually subtle, personal, and easy to dismiss.
Looking Toward 2026
2026 will be a year of rebuilding, deliberately and intentionally.
I’ll likely step into a new role. Not to chase momentum, but to apply what this year clarified. I’m more interested now in environments that value learning, reflection, and systems thinking over speed theater, ego, and surface certainty.
This newsletter will continue in that same spirit.
Fewer reflexive takes. More earned ones. More writing that comes from experience instead of performance. More attention to the signals that matter, especially the quiet ones.
2025 changed how I walk, how I lead, and how I pay attention.
I’m carrying that forward.