Fine. I'll tell you my 2026 themes.

Belated Happy New Year and Premature Happy Lunar New Year! I ended the year in the French Alps, where we got no snow at all…and then returned home to the Netherlands, where we got more than 10cm of snow - causing the entire country to grind to a halt. These are not complaints: our family still had a lovely time on holiday, and then we appreciated the enforced slowness when we returned^[1].

Needless to say, it’s a new year that’s already hitting me with some unexpected (and mostly delightful) surprises. Chief among them: I haven’t been absolutely abhorring the gray darkness of the winter this year! Many of you may know that I usually countdown the 120 days from November 1 to February 28, looking forward to that little extra bit of daylight that comes from the tip on its axis that the Earth does as it lands in March^[2]. Most years, I’ve been updating that countdown every couple days. This year, it occurs to me every couple weeks or so. I would love to take credit for some sort of improved outlook on life, but the real culprits here are a daily Vitamin D pill and investing in a much warmer, much less fashionable waterproof coat^[3].

I’m working on a more in depth article about my time in Singapore, but to get the year started let’s do some quick hits…

In this edition:

• My Big Themes for 2026
• The Charmed Idiot Strikes Again!
• A Sneaky Clever Holiday Gift
• A few links

The themes for 2026

I mentioned in my review of my 2025 themes that I could see how little conviction and confidence I had about them because I didn’t share them and they were pretty vaguely written.

So if you’re thinking, “Hey, he’s sharing them…that must mean that he has stronger feelings about them this year” then let me tell you: you’re absolutely right. My top 2 themes are big areas that I have a lot of conviction about and that I am coming into this year with a lot of energy and excitement about, but lest you think that means that 2025 was a bit of a lost year, I also don’t think I could have come to this point without some wandering in the wilderness. I’ll explain a bit more with each theme.

Theme 1: Build Meaningful Connections Between People Through Play

If you’ve been a reader of this newsletter for any amount of time, this one probably doesn’t strike you as all that surprising…and nor should it. A few things crystallized for me last year that will have a pretty direct influence on this theme:

• I realized that I gravitate toward a particular flavor of play. I don’t dislike competitive play, but I really dig collaborative play and I especially get into creative & collaborative play.
• I love identifying communities that recognize the value of play, regardless of whether it’s my type of play or not. Communities where people play together, in my mind, are also communities where people develop rich connections with each other.
• I am increasingly interested in how we get serious, grown ass people to be more playful. Believe you me, there’s probably a whole edition dedicated to this topic, but since coming back from Singapore I’ve been thinking a lot about how non-survival needs innovation is dependent on a playful phase of curiosity and exploration. In professional life, I think this is often at odds with people’s desire to be taken seriously. At various times in my own professional life, I have found ways to subvert that^[4]…and I think I want to again.
• For whatever reason, I keep coming back to books. The act of reading but also the aesthetic and utility of physical books are a deep part of my own identity, and I see reading & sharing what one is reading or has read as a major venue for interpersonal connection. Read Me Like A Book is a game that bridges my love of play with my love of books, and at least for this year I’m going down that path.

Over the course of this year, I intend to reorient most of my work around play. Fortunately, there’s already quite a lot of that in my portfolio, but it’s going to become a major qualifier for the kind of work that I do - both for external clients and for myself.

I’m going to keep developing Read Me Like A Book, both because it’s a space to bring my ideas about play to life and because doing so has been my own form of play lately. Some of the deepest satisfaction I got during my holiday break was working on a visual identity design for the game. And I also have some other game ideas that I’m going to prototype at some point^[5].

We can trace the arc of the story of play here beginning a couple years ago as an observer, then into a participant, and now moving (back) into a creator. I’m pretty geeked about this one.

Theme 2: Burn the Midnight Oil

Something shifted in me last year, and I could tangibly feel it toward the end of the year: my appetites changed. For the past several years I’ve been in a mode that I can only describe with the benefit of hindsight as intensely seeking external experience. There was no limit to my capacity for doing & trying new things, whether that was novel foods or new coffee varietals or traveling to new places. I had an insatiable for craving for novel experience.

It isn’t that the craving has gone away. Not exactly. But it has become more internally focused. I still enjoy and appreciate the novel external experience - I’m going to take the opportunities when they arise, and I might even put in a little bit of legwork to seek many of them out. I just feel less driven by that version of the craving. In its place, I feel a level of excitement to create that hasn’t been this heightened in a few years; I don’t just want to find novel experiences, I also want to create them.

This theme, then, is about a new kind of experience seeking: it’s about finding the projects that I’m so energized by that I find myself wiling away the hours when no one else is paying attention because I’ve been captured by something. That first theme is going to feed a lot of logs into this fire, but I’ve also started to keep a little repository of all the little fleeting ideas that I have over the course of any given day. What I’ve found in the couple months I’ve been building up that repository is that a lot of the ideas fly out of my head as soon as I jot them down, but there’s quite a few that stick around and keep on marinading…and then new ones start to emerge that are in conversation with some of the older ones. There’s enough there already that any time I feel the urge, I can dig into it and find something to spend an hour or two developing. I imagine most of it will never see the light of day…but that’s why the midnight oil exists in the first place.

And this theme is also about sustainability. I’ve burned the midnight oil in the past. It was a defining habit of my twenties and well into my mid-thirties, but it was also part of a boom & bust cycle of high intensity periods followed by burnout. This year, I am hopeful that I can find rhythms where I work at an intensity level that is satisfying without causing me to redline^[6].

The Charmed Idiot Strikes Again

Almost 2 years ago now, the Charmed Idiot showed up in Munich and snuck onstage with his friends to keynote a conference on AI in design education. Part of that experience involved telling a joke about why the chicken crossed the road and discovering that it was not a common joke format in Germany, leading to a laborious explanation of the joke and its supposed humorous nature.

Well, it turns out that the conference proceedings have now been turned into a beautifully designed book in both German & English.

If they had told me when they took my picture that it was going to be published in a book, I probably would not have removed the pen from over my ear…but I probably would have at least considered it.

Honestly, I’m quite proud to have been even a small part of this project and full of respect and awe for Dr. Rene Spitz and Annette Diefenthaler, the powerhouse team who made this whole thing possible. It turns out, you can acquire your own copy on Amazon.

A Sneaky Clever Holiday Gift

Speaking of books, a good friend of ours got Sarah the cookbook What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cookingfor Sinterklaas. More accurately, our friend gave Sarah the gift of making it easier for Sarah’s husband to cook well - what I most appreciate about this particular book is that it organizes its recipes based on roughly how long they will take to prepare with the fastest recipes taking between 15 and 30 minutes.

I mentioned at the top that we started the year in the French Alps, where the other members of my family skiied…and I did not. Nothing against skiing, I just decided this year that I don’t enjoy it enough to justify the effort. You know what I do enjoy, though? French grocery stores! If you haven’t been, the variety available in a typical French grocery - and I’m not taking an American sized supermarket, just a normal sized grocery store - is kind of mind blowing. The grocery in our village 1800m up in the Alps had oysters, foie gras, and fresh lychees. Amazing.

I didn’t lug this book along with me, but I did take a picture of a few recipes & cooked for our family every evening. I’m no great cook and certainly not the best cook in my house, but it was very satisfying to keep our family deliciously nourished, and this particular book made it pretty easy.

Let’s wrap with some links…

• The word gamification makes me feel physically ill…so it’s especially high praise to say just how much I appreciated IDEO’s guide to busting the myths of gamification. If you don’t want to click on that link, then I’ll just say to you: before you even think about just adding a scoreboard, first ask “what is it about this thing that we’re asking people to do that is authentically fun?” If you can’t answer that, no scoreboard is going to help you.
• Speaking of, I love that the toy & game company Hasbro has developed their own simulation game for developing up & coming leaders to think about corporate strategy & management. Hmmm….where have I seen that before?
• I haven’t been particularly compelled by the idea of user generated content in games like Fortnite and Roblox, but then I read about how Paul Thomas Anderson worked with Fortnite to create a One Battle After Another minigame…and that got my attention. It does feel distinctly different from pure UGC in that it has a 6-7 figure budget, but I’m old enough to remember when the Wachowskis created a whole intermedia experience around the Matrix, and despite the fact that the worst part of it was the actual sequel films, it was an interesting experiment. I’m interested in seeing more of this^[7].

If the stars align properly, I’ll be back in your inboxes in a couple weeks with a writeup about why Singapore caught me off guard and how play & creativity contribute to shaping a sense of shared identity. Until then!

Postscript: On the art in this newsletter

I spent the last year and a half playing around with triptychs for the banner images of the newsletter. Usually, I'd just go into my camera roll and find a few photos I'd taken since the last newsletter and see what kind of interesting compositions I could make out of them. It's arguably the least skillful form of art making possible, but it was a helpful exercise in training myself to see differently.

Toward the end of last year it started to feel a bit more like a chore than a creative exercise. I'm not totally ready to put it to bed yet, but for now I thought it would be more interesting to explore the vast libraries of artwork in the public domain and feature some of them. There are two main reasons I want to do this:

• Poking around in an archive - even a digital one - fascinates me, and this feels like a particularly pointed moment to revisit and explore the distinctly human way that many artists express themselves...especially because this work that is in the public domain has undoubtedly been used to train the robots. But how do you get an algorithm to produce something like this? I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying that it requires the level of craft and perspective that artists have to cultivate.
• One of the first things I discovered while exploring the Public Domain Image Archive - a thing I hadn't really thought about before - was how much of this work comes out of government projects. All 3 of the works in this edition of the newsletter came about from government projects - NASA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Index of American Design at the New York Public Library respectively. I worry that too often we think of the work of government as purely bureaucratic because that is the most ready association we can make. It's worth remembering that our civic institutions can also be engines of exploration, discovery, and aesthetic enrichment.

I'm not done playing around with triptychs, but I think for a while you'll see some public domain art in this newsletter. I'm definitely not done with plumbing the depths of the archives.