My Rally Cry for 2026

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle

Every year, I try to give myself a rally cry – something that will serve as my manifesto for the year. Historically, I haven’t publicized these, but those around me hear them early and often (likely to the point of ad nauseam). That said, I think these rallying cries warrant their purpose. It’s impossible to capture everything you want to accomplish with a single line, but simplifying your priorities into a single constraint often provides a lot more clarity.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my rally cry for this year over the last few months and really latched onto it after Thanksgiving. Last year was a year of historic highs and lows for me, leaving me craving consistency to level out that volatility. Consistency, while almost ultimately unattainable, brought a lot of rigor and efficiency to the endless queue of tasks I had to take on for our firm and my family over what was an unprecedented year. Simply put, it was the only way – show up and make sure that I treated every day like it was existential.

As I think about 2026, it’s my objective to make that consistency not just a survival mechanism, but a force. The beauty and curse of being in this business is that you become a sociologist of sorts – you are constantly interacting with different cultures across the companies and investment firms you work with, enabling a rare opportunity to see the best (and worst) practices across each. I’m on over a dozen boards and I can safely say that each culture is unique. When interacting with the founders of those companies, they are equally unique. But what is not unique is the consistency I see in the highest-achieving founders and organizations. The highest achieving of the bunch make commitments and keep them. They make audacious goals knowing the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. They don’t treat the fate of their business as a random walk, but rather something deterministic and self-correct decisively whenever they deviate from the path of success. Simply put, they commit to excellence.

Tom Brady has a quote that really spoke to me, “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.” For someone who is devoid of any special abilities, I found this really inspiring – that I TOO could be successful as long as I was consistent, determined, and willing to work for it (although I don’t think I ever had the frame to play in the NFL or to be successful at any professional sport for that matter). But I think that quote only shows one side of the story. We are a function of our own flywheels and that street goes two ways – negative habits reinforce negative habits and positive habits reinforce positive ones. The trick is making sure that your own flywheels are headed in the right direction.

2025 brought a resurgence to work ethic with the popularization of “9-9-6” culture, but I think “9-9-6” fails to address the true core of what I found myself craving. I believe in productivity > activity. I‘ve worked enough 100+ hour weeks to know that hours worked is not the yardstick for achievement. I now appreciate the flexibility that I have to work when, how and where I can be most impactful. What matters more than when and where, however, is the how.

I’ve long believed that rules, KPIs and most goal frameworks are subject to gamification, especially if they aren’t artfully structured. With that, I’ve tended to focus on objectives and principles – constructs that serve the true intent of what you are hoping to accomplish and guide your actions in support of those. This is why the rally cry has been so critical to my prioritization, acting as a guiding principle for my actions throughout the year. As I put on my sociologist hat, I see the highest performing people and organizations share a singular principle. A commitment to excellence. There is a famed Buddhist principle that says that “How you do anything is how you do everything” and as I look at the highest performing people I know and follow, they treat everything (at least everything relevant to their businesses) with a commitment to excellence. They don’t cut corners, they don’t wait for success to find them and they don’t take it for granted when they achieve it. They make investments and sacrifices to get it right whether it be the most mundane of customer interactions or the “make or break” moment for their companies. They stack those moments on top of each other each day, compounding that commitment and making the process of achieving excellence the default, not the exception. They don’t revel in glory when they achieve success, they get right back to work and build on that commitment. When you treat mundane customer interactions with a commitment to excellence, you are positioning yourself to outperform in those “make or break” moments where excellence matters most.

This leads me to my rally cry for the year from no other than Aristotle – “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

As I think about the powerful framing of this quote, it gets me incredibly excited for the year ahead. While I know I will stumble and fall endlessly on this path, my objective/principle is to commit to the habit of unlocking excellence. I’ve discussed this quote with a few of my founders already (one of whom fed me the “How you do anything is how you do everything” line) and it prompted some worthwhile discussions. Not so much on whether they were committed to excellence, but whether they were holding their teams to the same lofty expectation. That’s hard to do across large, fast-growing and heavily complex organizations, but if we’re really being honest with ourselves, the best organizations embed this ethos into their culture. Their employees don’t just “9-9-6”, they commit to excellence and do what it takes to achieve that (regardless of whether that’s a 50 hour work week or 120).

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that you can’t be excellent at EVERYTHING – it simply isn’t possible given the tradeoffs implicit with limited time/resources. But you can choose what to prioritize and to form habits around those to make achieving excellence easier. Unlike in football, venture is not the function of being born with special capabilities – it is a function of showing up with consistency, determination and the work ethic necessary to do the job right. That is something that we can all achieve if we set our minds to it. That’s what I’m committing to in 2026 and I hope you will too.