Tom's Top 3: December 30, 2025
How to Kick Ass in 2026
Hi everyone! Welcome to this week’s installment of Tom’s Top 3 Tuesdays, where I highlight three pieces of content (Podcasts/Shows/Songs/Articles/etc.) that I found interesting or noteworthy from the prior week.
Please toss me a like and share this with as many people as you can!!! Whoever you think might find this newsletter informative, entertaining, funny, idc—just drop them a link. It really helps grow the newsletter, so I greatly appreciate the support!
Here we are! The last newsletter of 2025—another year in the books. As we head into the new year, you might be thinking about setting goals or resolutions. I’m in the same boat, so here are some of the tools I am using to have the best 2026 possible.
[Articles] Sahil Bloom - The Personal Annual Review & The Annual Planning Guide
In this two-part series, Sahil Bloom outlines methods and templates for reflecting on the past year and using those insights to craft good goals for the year to come.
The Annual Review consists of seven questions:
What did I change my mind on this year?
What created energy this year?
What drained energy this year?
What were the Boat Anchors in my life?
What did I not do because of fear?
What were my greatest hits and worst misses?
What did I learn this year?
For me, I find the energy creation/draining questions to be the most helpful in identifying how I should be spending my time.
The crux of the Annual Planning Guide is breaking up your big, year-long goals into more approachable chunks (Checkpoint Goals), and then setting up daily systems that put you in position to hit your targets.
Bloom also suggests setting Anti-Goals, or what you don’t want to sacrifice throughout the year. Anti-goals are your guardrails.
[Podcast] Huberman Lab - Essentials: How to Set & Achieve Goals
Like Bloom, Huberman suggests having concrete goals with milestones set up in shorter intervals. He believes we can leverage dopamine to achieve our goals through use of behavioral tools, system thinking, and the visual system.
To me, the most interesting part of the podcast is when Huberman explains that negative visualization is more impactful than positive visualization. In the scientific literature, visualizing the negative outcome from not achieving your goal has been shown to actually double your probability of hitting it.
[YouTube] Steven Toozer - ARNOLD - “WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE?”
Sometime, when you’re in the dog days of summer, just trying to push through those increasingly-alluding Checkpoint Goals, you might need…
a little pep-talk from Arnold.
I’ll be back, next year! Happy holidays everyone!
If you made it to this point, drop a comment to say hi. And as always, please like and consider sharing with a friend who you think would enjoy! I’ll be back next week. ✌️
2️⃣. Happy New Year goals!