A huge part of any culture - whether a nation, an organisation, a family or you - is what it values. So, as we approach the end of 2025 and you start to think about goals, resolutions and plans for the new year, I encourage you to step back and ask a different question: what type of person do I want to be in 2026?

It’s more dangerous when we don’t know who we are. When we aren’t able to sort through the noise of opinion and focus on our own personality traits, we end up in trouble. We end up blowing in the wind of other people’s lives.

Earlier this week, I had a moment where I felt it was all too much. I felt overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious. So many great things have been happening with Wildest Dream recently, but it’s been a lot. And in that moment, it felt like too much for me to handle.

It was normal to go to a good school. Normal to go on amazing holidays. Normal to go through $70,000 of higher education. Normal to think the only two career paths out of business school were investment banking and management consulting. Normal to move to Thailand on an amazing salary. Normal to be told you could be the company’s zone president. Normal, normal, normal. 

As we continued to talk, I became more detached from the highly engaging conversation. Not detached because I was distracted, but because I was thinking. I’d had an insight. 

 I must have been listening to Taylor Swift that morning because about one hour and thirty minutes into the free-flowing conversation I was ready to interrupt. “Guys, I don’t think anything we have shared is particularly revelatory.”

Conformity is good, but it has never led to the creation of the Apple Macintosh or the lightbulb. The two Steve’s sat in their parents’ garages making computers and Thomas Edison spent 1000s of hours failing to eventually create a working lightbulb. The world doesn’t change when people remain the same. The world changes when a critical mass of humanity slips out of alignment of the norms of society.