What I’ll be taking into 2026
At the end of last year I did a bit of reflection and noted that my life was slowly starting to open up again. After a couple of intense years in family life (raising 3 kids under 3 ), now I felt I could be a bit more intentional with my time. I thought a lot about what my most important values are and set out to design my time to reflect those.
I’m a bit of a junkie for self-help books and spiritual texts, and one idea that kept coming up was the idea of ‘what is within your control’. The Christians covered this with the Serenity Prayer, The Stoics have a similar philosophy as do many others, and this also made a lot of sense to me in my own life experience.
So many things in life are out of our control, this is especially true in music. On a creative level you can prepare as much as you possibly can, and try your absolute best to get the magic flowing, but if it doesn’t want to show up on the day, it doesn’t show up. On an industry level, the same is true. I’ve had so many songs that I thought were going to be smash hits that are yet to come out, and I’ve had songs that I didn’t pay much attention to which went on to be recorded by established artists and be quite successful. I have days in the studio were every idea works, and somewhere I feel like I’m carving a song from stone. What I do know is that the odds of our work being good, and the odds of our work being successful are greatly increased by working consistently and showing up no matter what. I believe it’s not about every idea being good, it’s about creating in abundance and finding the gold in there. Please forgive the slight new age woo-woo words haha.
I feel like I’ve always had a good work ethic, but I was never much of a scheduler. A schedule in my life only emerged as a necessity of having so many things to juggle and needing to plan my time down to the half hour increment. But, I found there is something really freeing about the schedule – it goes hand in hand with the serenity prayer. I have already allocated how I am going to spend my time based on my values and all I have to do is make a commitment to that and show up. I think the key part here is it negates a whole bunch of negative self-talk that might convince us of reasons not to do the thing that we said we were going to do. The control we have is that we show up and do the thing.
So every morning through the warm AND cold months (minus a handful of days), I got up and had a swim in the ocean. I never once felt like doing it, but always felt a million times better afterwards, and this gave me a sense of confidence going into the day that I was in control.
Among the schedule were days for writing. I used to carry an attitude like THE NEXT song I write is going to be THE ONE. This attitude had the consequence of me feeling attached to everything I made and my self esteem being at the mercy of the outcome of that song. It also gave me dread that this was going to be the last song that the universe was going to allow me inspiration for. Now, I just think “I’ll write another one next time” and it’s sooo freeing. It doesn’t mean I care less about the quality of what I’m doing, I have just removed a bunch of the ego from the process. I can make things, if this one doesn’t work out, I’ll just make another.
Paradoxically, focusing energy on my INPUT instead of OUTPUT, has fruited some beautiful outcomes It’s been interesting coming to the end of the year and watching the results of this consistent work compound. Last week I won Producer of the Year at the Western Australian Music Awards. I believe this is a bi-product of focusing on the work at hand and showing up no matter what. Small consistent efforts snowball. Lots of books have covered the science behind this in more detail – I thought I’d just share my own experience. Feel free to hit me up if you want any recommendations on texts to read.
I’m also learning to apply the wisdom in the Serenity Prayer to my personal life. We can show up to any situation in life and act in a way that aligns with our values, regardless of whether someone disrespects us (and there’s been a lot of that this year). It is always our choice in how we react. Identifying this gives us control, and again, comes back to Serenity Prayer.
If you’re wondering, I’m not a religious person, but I do think there are some invaluable pearls of wisdom in most of these ancient texts. Which to close this out, brings me to wish Peace for everyone in the world, regardless of their religion. For context, just a few days ago there was an ideologically motivation terrorist attack in Australia at Bondi Beach.
I hope whoever is reading this can take something from my words. The world needs your art and it is of value.
Wishing everyone a safe and joyful Christmas period and the absolute best for 2026!