2025 Year in Review

Goals, resolutions, books read, and looking ahead to 2026

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One of my favorite family traditions is how my family does New Year’s Resolutions: we all come together for the holidays, and have a giant feast on New Year’s Eve before staying up to midnight.

At dinner, we all take turns going around the table, sharing what accomplishments we had that year, checking in on that year’s goals/resolutions, and sharing our goals/resolutions for the year ahead. My mom diligently writes these all down in a specific notebook, then takes it out the following year for New Year’s Eve once again. This notebook now has many years of resolutions inside.

I love this tradition for a number of reasons: it encourages you to be grateful and proud of how the year went, and starts you off on the right foot for next year. It’s super important to look back and reflect on the previous year’s achievements; it often surprises me how much I got done, and it gives me a reason to celebrate. They say you overestimate how much you can do in one day and underestimate how much you can do in a year, and looking back on the year’s accomplishments is a perfect example of this in practice. Sometimes when I’m feeling down or like I’m not doing too much with my life, I remember that I’ve actually done quite a lot and feel better.

Regarding goals, my view is the more ambitious, the better. My goals are across a variety of dimensions (athletic, personal, relationships, travel, professional, etc.), and I rarely succeed in all of them. I’ve found that having more ambitious goals means you fail more often, but that in the process you accomplish and learn more than you would’ve otherwise. If your bucket list has 10 things and you do all 10, woo-hoo; even better, have 100 things on your bucket list and when you accomplish only 50, that’s still a helluva lot better than just 10. The key is not taking that failure personally and seeing every setback as an opportunity to grow. Definitely easier said than done, and something I’m constantly working on.

Ultimately, the goal should be to fail more, and fail better. As James Clear writes:

In my early 20s, I wrote a list of ambitious things I wanted to do in life. Go bungee jumping. Create a movie. Start a business. That sort of thing. I did a few of them, but not most.

Looking back, however, that list was incredibly valuable because it taught me the usefulness of chasing bold ideas, even if they never materialize. The dreams that didn’t happen changed shape and led me down other interesting paths.

The important thing isn’t to achieve all your dreams, but to keep dreaming. Your desires change as you learn and grow. Old dreams will spawn new dreams. And eventually, one of these newer, more refined visions will find their moment and become reality.

And without further ado, my 2025 accomplishments:

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2025 Accomplishments:

• Skied every Ikon resort in California

• Found my own tutoring gigs, making $60+/hour

• Became a board director for the UCLA Co-op

• Curated an art gallery in said co-op, and hosted a grand opening with ~50 guests

• Went to every UCLA sorority’s brunch, then ranked them

• Led an unbelievably fun trip to Morro Bay with my friend Dylan through the Excursion Club

• Graduated from UCLA

• Traveled all over the UK and Ireland in April (Killarney for the win)

• Backpacked 2650 miles from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail with my girlfriend. Greatest adventure of my life (so far)

• Did my first work stay in Hawaii

• Interviewed for a bunch of AI startups in SF

• Didn’t succeed in any of the interviews (lol… more on this in a future blog)

• Toured 8 SF apartments, found 3 roommates, signed a lease in Nob Hill starting January 8th (More on this in a future blog, too!)

• Didn’t completely run out of money (a huge win)

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2025 Goals/Resolutions:

Here are the goals I had for 2025 and how they turned out. There were 8 in total, and I managed to finish 6 of them. Not too shabby!

1. Hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) ✅

   • This was an extremely ambitious goal for me, and I’m beyond proud that I went on this grand adventure and walked from the California/Mexico border to the Washington/Canada one. You can read the overview of the trip here, and all about it on my travel blog, Adventure with Dennis!

     

     A southern-terminus-to-northern-terminus high-5! 2650 miles in between those two photos :)

2. Read 50 books ✅

   • This is a standing goal for me every year. This year I read 70 books… click the footnote to see the full list and my recommendations! →¹ ←

     

     Best reading partner: Fig the Chicken

3. Visit 10 National Parks ✅

   • Another standing goal for me each year. This year, I visited 13 National Parks: Grand Teton, Haleakalā (twice), Killarney (in Ireland, with my friend Federico), Yorkshire Dales (with my girlfriend and her friend, Libby), Loch Lomond and the Trossachs (on a Scottish Highlands solo trip), Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, Lassen, Crater Lake, Mt. Rainier, North Cascades, and Everglades. 7 of them (Sequoia —> North Cascades) I hiked through on the PCT

     

     

     

4. Graduate from UCLA ✅

   • Lfg. Super proud of this one, what an epic adventure that one was!

     

     

5. Increase the number of weak ties I have ✅

   • This basically means to expand my professional and personal network in the goal of increasing unexpected, downstream opportunities. This sorta happened, but I’m looking to be more intentional about it this year

6. Run 2 more marathons ✅

   • I ran the LA Marathon in 4:44:58 and the Southampton Marathon in 3:59:51. 💪

     

7. Reach 1,000 Interosity subscribers ❌

   • No luck with this one. I currently have a few hundred and was writing well at the beginning of the year, but spent most of April onward writing my travel blog while in the UK and on the PCT. Thanks for being here anyway!

8. Intramural Champion ❌

   • Epic fail here. Probably my biggest disappointment at UCLA was not winning an intramural sport, which I tried so so SO hard to do. I must’ve played 30 different IM sports across my 10 quarters at UCLA, and made it to the finals of cornhole with my friend Nolan once. The other team brought their own bags and cooked us in the finale… still a bit salty about that one

     

     Holding up our #2 fingers. Honestly, you can’t see how disappointed I am in this photo lol 😆

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2026 Goals:

These are fixed things/events you want to make happen. A good framework for setting good goals is SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely; the best goals tick off all of these traits. Here are mine for 2026:

1. Beat my sister and girlfriend in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon that we’re racing in June (overall and in every discipline)

   • The three of us are competing in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon this year, where you swim 1.5 miles in the open SF Bay, bike 20 miles across the peninsula, and finish with a punishing 8-mile run. The goal is to beat their times in each discipline (swim, bike, and run) and the overall time

2. Win the Holiday Fun Run outright

   • The Holiday Fun Run is the local December race in my hometown, and I’ve been racing in it for at least 15 years. This year, I won my age group and got 4th place overall; the goal for 2026 is to win 1st place outright

3. Bench 225 lbs

   • This one is the most ambitious goal, and mostly stems from the fact that Jack Raines, my writing hero, once wrote that “every self-respecting man should be able to bench 225 lbs at least once in their life.” My brother and I have recently been on quite the weightlifting grind, which, for those of you who know me, is extremely unusual. But! I benched 135 lbs yesterday, and I (possibly, almost certainly, naively) think that increasing that by 90 lbs in one year is totally doable. Stay tuned

4. Publish an app on the Apple AppStore

   • I’m currently working on one, the goal is to have it published by March :)

5. Backpack 10 nights

   • I’ve grown to love backpacking after doing the entire Pacific Crest Trail in 2025, and while doing something like that, extreme is not in the picture this year, I definitely want to keep up the outdoorsiness and get in at least 10 nights in 2026. Summer JMT hike? Tahoe Rim Trail? Who knows!

6. Read 50 books

   • A standing goal for every year. Please text/email/call/comment any recommendations you have!!!

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2026 Resolutions:

These are broader than specific goals, and highlight more general trends/improvements I’m focusing on this year. There are 3 of them:

1. Increase sense of fashion/style

   1. My current fashion style mostly involves pants/shorts + Hokas + hoodie. Now that I’m moving to SF and am generally becoming an adult, that needs to change. Fortunately my girlfriend is quite motivated in this department. Lol

2. Become more fit/have a more toned upper body

   1. This goes hand in hand with the “Bench 225 lbs” goal, and stems from the fact that I have (very) fit legs from tons of cycling… and not that up top. Looking to change that in 2026

3. Buy food when I need it/focus on nutrition and dietary health

   1. This one’s a huge one for me, and comes from the fact that I (for some reason) am quite frugal with spending more money on better-quality food. When I interned at Kraft Heinz after my sophomore year, I’d eat 20 McNuggets for lunch because McDonald’s had a $5-for-20-McNuggets deal every lunchtime, and I wanted to save money. Needless to say, I started feeling quite shitty in the afternoons, and eventually bit the bullet and started spending $5/day more on lunch… it’s crazy how much my afternoon thinking, clarity, and energy levels improved after that. I’ll be really focusing on this one now that I’m on a BCG salary and my SF apartment is literally a block from Trader Joe’s

So there you have it! My New Year’s Resolutions for 2026! Stay tuned for the 2026 Year in Review next January to see how it all turned out. Thanks so much again for reading, and please share your goals/resolutions below; I’d love to stay in touch and hold each other accountable this year.

Let’s have a fantastic one :)

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Dennis’s Picks:

• I absolutely loved Gurwinder’s 26 Useful Concepts for 2026. Below are my favorites:

  

• Google’s 2025 Year in Search. I’ve always loved these yearly recaps, and 2025’s did not disappoint

• The quote, “Investments in your 20s pay off for the rest of your life, whether they are good investments or bad ones.”

• I generally think that Substack Notes are a plague to society (why host short-form posts when the entire point of your platform is to have long-form essays and increase attention span, not reduce it??? Keep that stuff on Twitter), but sometimes a gem like this pops up that makes me momentarily forget how much I dislike Notes

• I really enjoy the blog Unplugged Traveler, where the author goes on international trips without any devices or planning and figures it all of on the fly, then writes about it at home. Her recent piece about travel coincidences was great

• I have absolutely no idea where I found this article about gooning, but it was crazy (plus my first time hearing of the word). Enter at your own risk

1. Below is the full list of all the books I’ve read in 2025. I’m a big believer in dropping a book if you don’t enjoy reading it, so by that logic, I enjoyed most of the books on the list below since if I didn’t like reading them… I didn’t finish them. Life’s too short to read bad books! My favorite genres are hard science fiction and epic fantasy, though you can tell from the list below that I read all sorts of things; if it’s well written, I’m a fan.

My favorites are bolded, and I’ve included some comments on particular reads:

1. Fifth Business

2. The Manticore

3. The Player of Games

4. No More Mr. Nice Guy

5. Armor

6. The case against the sexual revolution

7. Land of big numbers (a collection of short stories about China)

8. Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy (absolutely hilarious, so great)

9. Wild (I read this because it’s about the PCT and quite famous, and was honestly very underwhelmed)

10. N*gger: The strange career of a troublesome word

11. The three body problem (book 1 of a FANTASTIC series)

12. The dark forest (book 2 of a FANTASTIC series)

13. Death’s end (book 3 of a FANTASTIC series)

14. The meth lunches

15. Foundation (I read the entire Foundation series on the PCT, epitome of great science fiction right there)

16. Foundation and empire

17. Second foundation

18. Patriot (I read this book several times this year and bought the physical book after reading it digitally. It’s Alexei Navalny’s (Russian opposition politician) autobiography, 11/10 recommend

19. Worst boyfriend ever

20. Foundation’s edge

21. Foundation and earth

22. Prelude to Foundation

23. Forward the foundation

24. Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy (So good that I reread it lol)

25. Restaurant at the end of the universe

26. Ready Player One

27. Ready Player Two (very disappointing sequel tbh)

28. The Martian

29. The Tartar Steppe

30. Everyone knows how much I love you

31. 1984

32. Project Hail Mary

33. Educated

34. Old man’s war

35. Ghost brigade

36. Powder Monkey

37. Prison Ship

38. Battle Fleet

39. The last colony

40. Lessons in Chemistry (Hands down the best book I read on the PCT)

41. Stolen focus

42. Yellowface (Thanks Atharv for the rec!)

43. Bad Blood (History of Theranos, the blood testing scam)

44. Red Notice

45. The Coddling of the American Mind

46. The Canceling of the American Mind

47. Shogun Part 1 (Quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read. Recommended by my friend Ray, unbelievable story and narrative. I did nothing for three days except read the two books that make up Shogun)

48. Shogun Part 2

49. I love Russia

50. Patriot

51. Cannery Row

52. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (So good that I reread it a third time)

53. Restaurant at the End of the Universe

54. Life, the universe, and everything

55. So long, and thanks for all the fish

56. Mostly harmless

57. Animal farm

58. Barbarians at the Gate

59. Notes on being a man

60. Everything is tuberculosis

61. Husk

62. Fast Food Nation

63. The Jungle (Yes, the muckraker book from AP World History. It’s actually super good!)

64. City of Ember

65. People of Sparks

66. Diamond of Darkhold

67. Prophet of Yonwood

68. Private Equity

69. Tomatoland

70. American Dirt (simply wow)

71. Lone Survivor