2025 was not a good year, like the one that came before. I spent it burnt out. My colleague J during my team’s Christmas dinner last week described it as a year in which we had to fight and slay a range of different dragons, and indeed we did.

Every year, since 2010, I post a list of things that gave me some sense of accomplishment, things about which you can say ‘Tadaa!’. This is the 16th edition. And like last year, I’m writing it with hesitance. I’m struggling to write the list this time. Where in other years I looked forward to look back over the past 12 months this time I really don’t. All the more reason to do it, I suppose.

The original reason for this posting is still valid: I tend to forget a lot of the things I actually do, moving on to the next thing immediately, resulting in thinking I haven’t done much at all. Leafing through my notes and calendar at least once a year tends to resurface things and make me more aware of things I take a sense of accomplishment from.

So here goes, in more or less random order.

• We are still standing. My company still exists. The illness and death of my business partner Frank, and the path we walked together, at work as a team, at home as a family was this year’s main focus. In June, me being the de facto CFO since its founding in 2011, I doubted the company would still be there in November. Yet, it is. We didn’t make any progress, but we did reach the end of 2025 in more or less the same shape as we started it. Without Frank sadly, but with everyone else still standing. Shell-shocked but picking up the pieces. Everyone of the team showed up with what they could muster throughout the year. We took care of each other, found new clients and projects, were open about our pain and grief amongst ourselves and to the outside. Friends from around our company’s network had our back too. A dozen households had bread on the table, several felt able to plan ahead for life events, several could afford to become first time home owners, or support their partner migrating from abroad to live here. That counts for something, that our company can be a building block for it. As we sat around the dinner table last week with our team, reinventing our end of year traditions together, and I looked around, I was proud of us, not just as colleagues but as family. We know what we have carried together, and wherever each of us may end up over time, that will remain.
• We, our family of three, are still standing. E and Y both have had to carry all the things I brought home too, my own diminished mental health. I’m immensely grateful to them both. All those days I felt lost, E and Y were why I got up in the morning. Traveling in the past 26 years together has always been healing for E and me, and E made sure we did things together throughout the year. We played in the snow in Switzerland, spent a lovely day building things together at the Lego House in Billund for Y’s birthday, drank in the beauty of Hockney’s work in Paris which left me crying on the floor of the museum, breathed the calm and freedom of the Austrian alps. We had many little day trips, near and further away. Being together is the best thing.
• Being open about my diminished mental health has helped a lot in making space, deepened interactions and connections. All of us carry something. Thank you for sharing.
• Traveling for work is dear to me, and I deliberately did some more of it than in the last few years. I worked in Warsaw, Brussels, Luxembourg, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Milano. I alllowed myself to be there in the present and in a single context. Simply walking where my feet would take me, and doing a few things outside my comfort zone, like buying a last minute ticket to take in a concert in the Teatro alla Scala. I made efforts to keep myself comfortable while traveling, to take care of myself in ways I normally find hard to do. Going swimming in the midst of a conference day for instance, and return refreshed an hour later.
• I reached out to friends and spent two weekends, in May and in November, with them in Switzerland where they live. We normally don’t call or interact much at all, but they recognised me reaching out if I could drop by as the urgent bat signal that it was. Thank you dear friends.
• With our team we spent a week in Sesimbra, Portugal, under the kind guidance and deep expertise and experience of Beverly and Etienne Wenger-Trayner. A week in April that, next to the training and learning, also served to, as a team, get to grips with what was about to happen, and I’m glad Frank was able to come along. We also saw dolphins up close. Bev and Etienne deserve our team’s and my personal deep gratitude in how they accommodated the unusual situation we were in.
• Reading was a source of relaxation and learning. I’m glad I kept up my reading throughout the year. A little over 80 books this year, mostly fiction. And for the first time not a cent of that was spent at Amazon. I fully moved away from Amazon for ebooks and physical books. Once I decided, it turned out to be easier than I thought it would be.
• Writing was helpful too. Even if less of it ended up on my blog. I’ve been blogging for 23 years now, and that’s a stretch of time that gives any writing another layer of meaning. Some of you have been along for the ride all that time, others have been here shorter but reading consistently, and our resulting conversations across the web, through email, and in person are dear to me.
• Letting go of a range of tasks, not being able to keep all contacts going, all juggling balls up in the air, is a lesson I am slowly learning. I transferred my company internal tasks to others on the team and external help. I will not pick those tasks back up when I’m ‘better’ either. It takes time though, and only now after 4 months of purposefully shifting things away from me I’m at the point where I emptied my plate of everything except one client project. Sometime in the next months I’ll start thinking what new and other things I may want to add. I had to let go of various parts of client work and obligations too, and that is something that goes counter to all my impulses, that feels like a personal failure. The grace and understanding with which the clients concerned let me navigate those cliffs I deeply appreciate.
• Tinkering with personal software tools is a source of joy. I’m glad I did some of that this fall. Like adapting my feed reader, so I can write better directly from it. The sight of having self-written bits of coding work like I want them to on my laptop feels like magic always still (even 43 years after writing my first lines of code).
• I stood on stage for a few presentations, one at the UNGGIM Europe plenary and one locally, and enjoyed doing them. Sharing stories and seeing that it reaches and touches people is hugely rewarding. I’ve missed that.
• Went to a few events just because I felt like it, to hear some new things.
• I look at the coming year with some confidence, work for me and my team is largely secure, and though I still need more rest, I also see ways forward for myself.

More a sense of gratitude than of accomplishment, more a sense of weariness than one of results. In recognition of the love received and moments of joy through it all. It is what it is. Kintsugi.