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Tombri Bowei
Tombri Bowei

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The Reset Button That Wasn't: Why 2026 Demands a New Kind of Resolution

The air is thick with it again—that familiar, almost metallic taste of transition. The “New Year, New You” industrial complex is revving up, offering shiny packages of reinvention. Gym memberships, productivity apps, life hacks. We’re told to hit the “reset button”. But what if that’s the lie? What if January 1st isn’t a magical line in the sand but a continuation of the same story you’ve been writing all along?

The truth is, we don’t get a reset. We get an ellipsis...

This year, I’m not interested in your resolutions. I’m interested in your continuations.

The Archaeology of Your Becoming

Instead of drafting a list of what you’ll start, try this: in these quiet, liminal days between Christmas and the countdown, perform an archaeology of your own becoming.

  1. Find the Glimmer:
    Scan the rubble of 2025. Not for the big wins or catastrophic failures, but for the glimmers. That tiny idea you noted in your phone at 2 AM. The conversation shifted something almost imperceptibly. The project you abandoned, but whose first page still fascinates you. That’s not trash. That’s fertile soil.

  2. Honour the Scar Tissue:
    What hurt this year? Not to relive the pain, but to acknowledge the strength of the mend. The scar tissue isn’t just a reminder of the wound; it’s proof of your resilience. It’s the strongest part of the leather. What did surviving that teach you about your own craftsmanship?

  3. Identify the Current:
    You are not in still water. You are in a current that started long before 2025. What is its direction? Is it pulling you toward curiosity, toward comfort, toward creation, or toward chaos? You can’t change the current, but you can learn to read it, to swim with purpose within it.

The 2026 “Continuation Manifesto”

Forget “new”. Let’s aim for “deepened”, “redirected”, and “more intentional”.

  • Continue, But With a Twist:
    Don’t “get back to reading”. Re-read the book that haunted you and write your rebuttal in the margins. Don’t “learn to code”. Build the one stupid, small, useless tool that would make you smile. The twist is what makes it yours.

  • Nurture the Adjacent Possible:
    Your next breakthrough isn’t in a distant, unrelated field. It’s in the room next door to your current expertise. The graphic designer learns not just UI but also the psychology of perception. The backend developer dips into poetry to write cleaner, more expressive code. What’s adjacent to you?

  • Practice “Strategic Abandonment”:
    This is the hardest one. What one thing from 2025 are you allowing yourself to formally quit? Not out of shame, but with a ceremony of thanks? “Thank you for the idea for a startup. You taught me about markets, but I am letting you go to make space.” Quitting as an act of power, not failure.

  • Install “Emotional Checkpoints”:
    Mark your calendar for April, July, and October. Not with goals, but with questions: “Am I feeling more like a curator or a prisoner of my life?” “What has my anger/joy been trying to tell me?” These are not performance reviews. They are course corrections.

The Vulnerability Loophole

Here is the secret no one tells you about “high engagement”: it doesn’t come from perfection. It comes from the specific, the awkward, the real.

Your dev.to post that gets the passionate comments won’t be “10 React Best Practices.” It will be “The Time I Chose a Terrible Database and What the Fire Taught Me About Life.” Your story about the bug that mirrored your own feeling of being broken. That’s the connection point.

So as the clock ticks, don’t think about erasing. Think about editing.
Don’t think about becoming someone new. Think about becoming more yourself, with intention.

The ball will drop. The confetti will fly. And when the quiet returns, you won’t be staring at a blank screen. You’ll be staring at a rich, complicated, beautiful document called “Your Life”. The cursor is blinking. You don’t need to start a new file.

Just write the next true sentence.


What’s one “glimmer” from your 2025 that deserves to be continued? Share yours below—let’s see what we’re carrying forward.

Here’s to a 2026 not of rebooting, but of becoming.
A truly happy, intentional, and continuous New Year to you all 🥂💫.

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