New year, same brain. This is usually the time where the world collectively decides we’re all going to “completely change our lives.” Join the gym. Travel more. Shoot more. Post more. Fix everything in twelve weeks and somehow maintain it forever.

I have done versions of that. It never sticks.

These days, I treat the crossover from one year to the next like a line in the sand, not a magic portal. It is a pause. A chance to look back, look forward, then keep walking. No upgrade patch gets installed at midnight. It is still just you, your habits, and the stories you tell yourself.

In 2025, a lot of those stories ended up in my “Unteachable Photography Lessons” posts.

Those posts were therapy disguised as blog posts. I was not writing from a mountaintop. I was writing from the middle of the mess, gear temptations, comparison traps, chasing validation, wondering what I am even doing with this camera sometimes.

Most of those lessons are not new. Experienced photographers have been saying them for decades. You hear them and think:

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

Then you go out, ignore them, bang your head against the wall for a year or more, and finally go,

“Ah. Right. That is what they meant.”

They are unteachable in the sense that they do not really land until you have lived them.

So for my first post of 2026, I want to zoom out from individual lessons and talk about how I am thinking about the year itself. Not as a list of resolutions, but as a framework that gives those lessons room to actually stick.

One Question For 2026

I am trying to keep this year brutally simple and front loaded around a single question:

What would have to happen by the end of 2026 for me to consider the year a success?

Not “perfect.” Not “viral.” Not “I finally became the ultra-productive travel God my brain thinks I should be.” Just: successful on my own terms.

The trick is to keep the answers short. A few points, not a shopping list.

If I need a paragraph to explain why I am chasing something, it is probably not a real priority. It is probably ego, FOMO, or a vague sense that I “should” be doing what everyone else seems to be doing.

So I am trying to answer that question with a very small handful of things, and then let everything else orbit around them.

Accept Trade Offs.

Here is the unromantic part of all this. To pick something up, you have to put something down. We hate that sentence. I do too. I would love to believe I can:

Travel more
Post more
Write more
Learn new skills
Nail fitness
Have a social life
Sleep well

…all at the same level, all at once, simply because I am “motivated this year.”

But motivation does not expand your capacity. It just makes you feel more optimistic about overloading it.

If I say photography is a priority, that means something else is not.

If I want to travel more, something has to shrink to make space.

This is where the “unteachable” part kicks in. You can read that sentence, nod, and still spend six months trying to cram ten priorities into a calendar built for five. At some point your body calls your bluff.

So for 2026, I am trying to be more honest about the trade-offs. Instead of pretending I can do everything, I am asking:

What am I choosing not to chase this year?
What am I willing to be average at so I can be intentional somewhere else?

It feels uncomfortable, but it is a cleaner kind of discomfort than constant burnout.

Structure Over Motivation

Another thing I am slowly learning the hard way: high-motivation days do not matter as much as low-motivation structures.

Anyone can have a burst of energy during the first week of January and smash through a backlog of edits or schedule ten posts. The real test is what happens on a random Thursday in June when you are tired, work is chaotic, and the last thing you want to do is pick up a camera or open Lightroom.

If the whole plan relies on “feeling inspired,” it is dead on arrival.

So I am trying to build things that survive low-motivation days:

Simple, repeatable routines instead of heroic sprints.
Fixed times for shooting, writing, or editing that happen regardless of mood.
Tiny default actions that count as progress even when I am cooked.

It is not Epic. But it is the only way those big reflective insights from 2025 get any traction.

The point is to give future me less room to negotiate his way out of the things he says he cares about.

How This Ties Back To “Unteachable”

So why am I talking about resolutions in a series that is supposed to be about photography lessons?

Because most of the hard lessons from last year were not really about cameras. They were about how I relate to the craft:

Chasing gear instead of practice.
Shooting for the feed instead of for myself.
Letting comparison quietly drain the joy out of it.
Acting like creativity owes me something if I “do everything right.”

Those things do not magically reset on January 1st.

If anything, the new year can make them worse. There is pressure to reinvent, to level up, to finally become that ideal version of yourself.

I am not interested in that version of me anymore.

Wrapping Up 2025’s Lessons

With that frame in mind, I want to look back at the Unteachable Photography Lessons from 2025 and see how they feed into this year. Some of them I handled well, others I ignored and paid for, and a few are still very much “work in progress.”