Hello!
It’s Thursday, 1st January 2026. Happy New Year to those who’ve been reading Bold Efforts for a while, and to the new readers who joined over the holidays.
This Calvin & Hobbes strip is one of my favorite creations ever. “Let’s go exploring” is not a strategy. It’s a posture. One that assumes the world is worth engaging with even when you don’t know exactly where you’ll end up. That feels like the right frame for this year.
Not because 2026 is special, but because certainty has become a luxury. The last few years have trained us to overfit to predictions and underinvest in how we think when those predictions fail. Exploration, in that sense, isn’t about wandering aimlessly. It’s about staying open, observant, and willing to adjust as reality reveals itself.
That’s also how I think about Bold Efforts.
If you’re new here, a quick line on what this newsletter tries to do. I don’t write about news or weekly narratives. By the time those reach your inbox, they’ve already expired. Bold Efforts is where I think through ideas that tend to hold up over time. The kind you come back to months or years later and find still useful.
I briefly considered starting the year with predictions. Every January seems to demand them. Then I remembered how confidently wrong most of us have been recently, myself included. So I’ll skip that. Uncertainty has been remarkably consistent, and pretending otherwise feels unnecessary.
There is a small housekeeping update worth mentioning. You would have noticed that Bold Efforts is getting a new website and has a refreshed design language. Nothing dramatic. Just a cleaner place for these ideas to live.
One thing that feels hard to ignore lately, without trying to forecast anything, is that people are quietly renegotiating the role work plays in their lives. Not through manifestos or LinkedIn posts, but through ordinary decisions about time, energy, and what they’re no longer willing to trade away.
For a long time, work sat at the center of everything. It shaped where people lived, how days were structured, and how success was measured. We called this ambition or discipline. In practice, it mostly made large systems easier to run.
That arrangement is under strain. Not because of a single technology or policy change, but because many people experienced something that’s hard to unlearn. Life often works better when work adapts to it, not the other way around.
This doesn’t mean effort no longer matters, or that everyone wants less work. It means people are paying closer attention to how much of their best time work consumes, and whether the trade-offs still make sense. Calmer mornings, unrushed evenings, and choosing where to live deliberately are no longer fringe ideas.
The nature of work itself is also shifting in quieter ways. Tasks are becoming more specialized, careers less linear, and value harder to measure by hours or visibility alone. Tools like AI accelerate this by compressing effort and raising the importance of judgment, taste, and context. This isn’t a prediction. These pressures are already present.
When things feel this fluid, anchors matter more than plans. How you think. What you prioritize. The principles you return to when the map keeps changing. Work becomes one system among many, not the organizing principle for everything else.
Institutions usually resist these shifts longer than individuals do. People adapt quietly, then decisively, once they find a way of living that feels more sustainable.
So instead of predictions for 2026, I’ll leave you with a modest hope. That you spend a bit more time designing your work around your life, not the other way around. That clarity matters more than busyness, and outcomes more than appearances. And that when things feel noisy or uncertain, Bold Efforts remains a steady place to think.
Happy New Year! Thanks for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.