The Year That Counts

January is the most emotionally unqualified month to be in charge of your destiny. It’s cold, dark, full of leftover cookies and crummy gifts, and you’re still emotionally unpacking the previous year like a suitcase that went through three airports and a mild trauma. Yet this is when the world says, “Okay, now reinvent your entire life. Go.” No. Hard pass. We are not emotionally available for radical self-overhaul while wearing sweatpants and questioning our life choices over reheated lasagna. So I’ve declared a truce with reality and introduced a far more civilized and effective strategy—what I call Deliberate Delusion.

Here’s how it works: instead of hustling, forcing, striving, or trying to drag your future into existence by its hair, you fill your mind with the most deliciously unreasonable images of what you want this year to look like. You paint in broad, bold, glorious strokes. You see yourself thriving in your work, laughing in your relationships, relaxed with money, inspired in your creativity, adored by your friends, supported by the universe, and generally glowing like someone who drinks champagne and enjoys life. You don’t argue with your dreams. You don’t fact-check them. You move in to them emotionally. You feel the win before the scoreboard changes.

Your only real assignment is to make this a daily ritual—five minutes. Close your eyes, cue the internal highlight reel, and let your nervous system marinate in joy, confidence, gratitude, ease, and quiet expectation. When you live inside possibility, your mind naturally starts spotting pathways, coincidences, openings, and invitations that used to be invisible. You don’t chase the future. You become magnetic to it.

Do this for a month and watch what begins to rearrange itself around you. That’s the real heavy lifting. That’s the architecture of creation. And just to be clear—no, I am not doing a dry January. I’m doing a deliberate delusion January. It pairs beautifully with coffee, hope, and a quiet confidence that something wonderful is already on its way.