The New Year That Still Doesn't Feel Like One

For 28 years, my year started in August.

January 1st was just... mid-year. A brief pause in the middle of the school year. A chance to catch your breath between the holiday concert chaos and the spring enrollment push. The real fresh start came when buses rolled up in late summer, new faces filled the hallways, and everything reset.

This is my fourth January as an entrepreneur. And I still don’t know what to do with it.

The world wants me to set resolutions. Make bold predictions. Declare this “my year.” But my body and brain are still wired to the academic calendar. Four years out, and January still feels like the middle of something, not the beginning.

Here’s what I’ve learned: 28 years of conditioning doesn’t disappear just because you change your business card. The rhythms that structured your professional life leave deep grooves. And entrepreneurship doesn’t hand you natural reset points to replace them. There’s no summer break to regroup. No new school year to wipe the slate clean. You have to manufacture your own rhythms or risk running on a treadmill that never stops.

So instead of resolutions, I’m asking myself a question I revisit every January: What rhythms have I built, and are they actually working?

Maybe that’s the real long-term work of this transition. Not just building a business, but building a life structure from scratch when the one you relied on for three decades disappears.

To those of you still in schools: enjoy that mid-year pause. You’ve earned it.

To those of you who’ve made the leap: how do you mark time now?