Watering What Matters: My Theme for 2026

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I used to think life was about keeping buckets full.

Career bucket. Family bucket. Health bucket. Relationships bucket. Personal growth bucket.

The metaphor made sense. When a bucket gets low, you fill it back up. Pour enough in, and you're good until the next time it drains.

Simple math. Obvious fixes. I could visualize it clearly: five buckets sitting in a row, and my job was to run between them with a hose, topping off whichever one looked emptiest.

I built my entire approach to life around this mental model.

I was wrong.

Here's what the bucket metaphor gets dangerously wrong: it implies you can neglect something for a long time and then make up for it with one big pour.

Pull an all-nighter to finish the project, then crash for twelve hours. Skip workouts for three months, then hammer the gym every day for two weeks. Miss every family dinner for a quarter, then book a big vacation to compensate. Ignore your network for six months, then blast through fifty LinkedIn messages in one afternoon.

The bucket mentality rewards heroics. It celebrates the dramatic save. It makes you feel productive when you finally get around to filling something that's been empty for too long.

Anyone who has tried this approach knows the truth. The bucket overflows. Or worse, it leaks faster than you can fill it. Your body breaks down from the sudden exercise intensity. Your kids remember the missed dinners more than the vacation. Your network can smell the transactional desperation in those catch-up messages.

The metaphor breaks because life doesn't work that way.

Then I started thinking about plants.

In our house, we have killed plenty of plants and it taught me something I couldn't learn from any business book or leadership framework. Something that completely reframed how I think about what matters.

Plants teach you something different about attention. You cannot let a plant dehydrate and then dump water on it to bring it back to life. That will actually kill it. The roots can't absorb a flood after a drought. The shock destroys the very systems that would otherwise help it recover.

Overwatering is just as deadly as neglect. Too much attention, applied too intensely, drowns the roots and rots the foundation. The plant needs the right amount, delivered consistently, over time.

No heroic saves. No cramming. Just steady attention.

This is a much harder lesson to accept.

The bucket mentality lets you feel productive when you're really just firefighting. You get the dopamine hit of pouring something from empty to full. Look at me fixing things. Look at me being present. Look at me making up for lost time.

The plant mentality forces you to admit that consistent small actions matter more than occasional grand gestures. It demands presence, not performance. It requires you to show up even when nothing is visibly broken, even when no bucket is obviously empty, even when the heroic save would feel more satisfying than the quiet maintenance.

I've been in sales and revenue leadership long enough to see this pattern play out professionally, too. The rep who ignores their pipeline for three weeks and then makes two hundred calls in a day. The manager who skips one-on-ones for a month and then schedules a three-hour team retreat. The leader who neglects forecast accuracy all quarter and then demands daily pipeline reviews in the final two weeks.

These are bucket behaviors. They feel productive. They look decisive. They almost never work.

The best sellers I've ever worked with are waterers. They touch their pipeline a little bit every day. They follow up consistently, not desperately. They build relationships through regular small interactions, not sporadic grand gestures. They understand that consistency compounds in ways that heroics never can.

2025 was my year of planting seeds.

At Mixmax, I planted seeds of learning. I stepped into a role that stretched me. I built frameworks, tested approaches, made expensive mistakes, and documented what worked. I got to see firsthand what it takes to build a revenue engine at the scale-up stage, where the playbook from your last company rarely translates directly. I learned lessons about forecasting, about team development, about what actually moves the needle versus what just feels productive. Some of those lessons came easy. Most came hard.

In my network, I planted seeds of relationship. I met people who have become genuine friends, not just connections. These aren't the kind of relationships you build by swapping business cards at a conference and adding each other on LinkedIn. These are relationships built through showing up, having real conversations, being vulnerable about what you don't know, and finding genuine common ground beyond just "we both work in sales."

I also reconnected with people I'd let drift. Former colleagues. Old mentors. Friends from previous chapters of my career who I'd been meaning to reach out to for months or years. Some of those seeds took root. Some didn't. That's the nature of planting.

With GTM Juice, I planted seeds of content. I started building a platform from nothing. I found my voice, tested what resonated, wrote things that landed and things that fell flat. I put my ideas out into the world and watched what happened. I learned what my audience actually cares about versus what I assumed they'd care about. The newsletter went from an idea to a reality. The foundation exists now in a way it didn't twelve months ago.

With my family, I planted seeds too. Hazel and Harlow are at ages where the experiences we create together start to stick. The traditions we establish now are the memories they'll carry forward. Heather and I planted seeds of intentionality in our marriage, making time for each other in ways that easy to let slide when work gets busy and kids demand attention.

A lot of seeds went into the ground in 2025.

Here's what I've learned about seeds, though: planting is the easy part.

Any enthusiastic gardener can buy a hundred seed packets and scatter them everywhere. The optimism of possibility. The excitement of what could be. The thrill of imagining the garden you'll have in six months. But gardens don't grow from planting alone.

Plenty of people start a newsletter, post for three weeks, and disappear. Plenty of people meet interesting contacts at conferences and never follow up. Plenty of people set ambitious goals in January and quietly abandon them by March. Plenty of people talk about the changes they're going to make in their habits, their relationships, their careers.

Planting is easy because it's all potential and no maintenance. It's the fun part. It's the part where everything is still possible.

Gardens grow from watering.

This is where 2026 begins for me.

My word for the year is not "growth" or "scale" or "execute" or "optimize." It's "water."

One word. One intention. One filter for how I'll make decisions over the next twelve months.

Watering what matters means accepting that I cannot tend everything. Some seeds will not make it, and that's okay. Better to have fewer thriving plants than a hundred struggling seedlings competing for attention. Not every relationship I started building needs to become a deep friendship. Not every content idea needs to become a fully developed framework. Not every professional opportunity needs to be pursued.

Choosing what to water is just as important as the watering itself. Maybe more important.

Watering what matters means choosing depth over breadth. Going deeper with the relationships I've started building instead of constantly meeting new people. Going deeper with the frameworks I've developed instead of chasing the next shiny methodology. Going deeper with the audience I've started to build instead of trying to reach everyone.

The temptation in 2026 will be to keep planting. To start new things. To expand. To say yes to more. That temptation is strong for me because I genuinely love the energy of new beginnings. But I've learned, painfully, that starting things is not the same as finishing them. Opening doors is not the same as walking through them.

Watering what matters means showing up consistently, not sporadically. Small amounts of attention, regularly applied, beat massive bursts of effort followed by neglect. This is true for my health. It's true for my relationships. It's true for my content. It's true for my team.

I would rather write one thoughtful piece every week than publish daily for a month and then disappear for three months. I would rather have a fifteen-minute call with someone in my network every week than a three-hour dinner once a year. I would rather spend thirty focused minutes with my daughters every evening than a whole "daddy day" once a month to make up for being absent.

Consistency is unglamorous. It doesn't make for impressive stories. Nobody gets excited about "I did a small amount of work, repeatedly, for a long time." But consistency is what actually works.

This applies to everything.

My family doesn't need a blowout vacation once a year. They need me to be present at dinner. They need me to put my phone away when I'm with them. They need me to be actually there, not physically present, but mentally checked out, thinking about tomorrow's forecast call.

My network doesn't need me at every conference. They need me to actually follow up on the conversations we start. They need me to remember what they told me three months ago and ask about it. They need me to be helpful without expecting something in return.

My content doesn't need a viral post every week. It needs consistent value delivered to people who are actually paying attention. It needs me to keep showing up even when the engagement numbers are discouraging. It needs me to trust that compounding works even when you can't see the results yet.

My team doesn't need me to swoop in and save deals. They need me to coach them consistently, develop them systematically, and create an environment where they can do their best work every day.

My health doesn't need a dramatic transformation. It needs me to make reasonable choices repeatedly for a long time.

None of this is complicated. All of it is hard.

I'm writing this as 2025 comes to a close because I want to make the commitment public. I've learned that public accountability helps me follow through on things I care about. When I tell people what I'm going to do, I'm more likely to actually do it.

In 2026, I am going to water what matters.

Fewer new seeds. More attention to what's already planted.

Fewer grand gestures. More quiet consistency.

Fewer buckets to fill. More plants to tend.

Fewer heroic saves. More steady presence.

If you're reading this, I'll ask you the question I've been asking myself over the past few weeks: what did you plant in 2025 that deserves your water in 2026?

Maybe it's a relationship you started building that could become something meaningful if you just kept showing up.

Maybe it's a skill you started developing that could become a real strength if you practiced consistently.

Maybe it's a project you launched that could become something significant if you stuck with it through the unglamorous middle.

Maybe it's a change you made in your health, your habits, or your mindset that could become permanent if you maintained it.

And here's the harder question: what are you still trying to pour into buckets that would grow better as plants?

What are you trying to fix with heroic effort that would actually respond better to steady attention?

Where are you flooding when you should be watering?

I don't have perfect answers to these questions. I'm figuring it out as I go, same as everyone else. But I know the metaphor I'm using matters. It shapes how I think about what deserves my attention and how I deliver that attention.

In 2026, I'm done with buckets.

I'm watering what matters.