Commitments
A 2025 Milestone Post
I’ve written about my journey more than I expected this year.
It was pivotal both in my personal life and my career, and writing about it helped me make sense of it all.
Today, I look back on it in totality so that I can read this in the future as a reminder of how important 2025 was, and how the struggles made the importance that much more visceral.
After stumbling around creative endeavors for years, I ventured to write fiction. That was the moment it finally clicked. I’ve danced around the idea of writing fiction for years but never fully committed to it due to various social issues I feared confronting. It was the first time that something ticked all the boxes: I love doing it, I can do it in service of others, I can make an impact at scale, I can explore ideas I’m fascinated by, I can build the lifestyle I want, it aligns well with my personality, and it has the potential to generate the required income to support the family life I want.
Figuring out what I wanted to do with my life was such a relief. It finally opened the door for me to do something I’ve been pondering for a long time: taking a leap of faith. Though on the surface it seemed like a risk, it felt like more of a risk staying put. So, this year, I jumped.
Outside of my career, something amazing and beautiful happened in my personal life. I got married.
To call Shannon my wife will never fully capture everything that she is to me. She is the first person who made me feel fully understood for all that I was, am, and could be. Meeting her catalyzed a major transformation in me, and through her, being the full extent of me in all my strangeness was safe. I’d never felt that so consistently before, and I never knew it was possible to love so much. She seems to have an unspoken knowing of me in past, present, and future, and is always encouraging and pulling the best parts of me forward. Without her in my life, I might still be stumbling around trying to figure out my path.
In 2023, I challenged myself to define—at the highest level—what the vision of my life should be aimed at. What I came to was: be an excellent husband and father for my family and make meaningful contributions that reduce human suffering.
I know that I will serve the former through building a family with Shannon, and I will serve the latter by telling great, meaningful, and entertaining stories.
So, making a lifelong commitment to both my career and the person I want to build a family with all in the same year really makes this a pivotal and foundational year in the story of my life.
The year came with challenges, too. A lot of them were social, but various frustrating health issues crept in as well.
The week before I was due to leave my job, I was hit with a surprise appendectomy, which was painful, especially in the stages after the surgery. I managed to optimize my recovery while still writing and continuing the draft of my first novel. The health issues are particularly frustrating because I’ve put a lot of thought and effort into my health protocol for at least 10 years now. Despite the carefully crafted diet, persistent exercise, and consistent and optimized sleep, I find myself with lasting muscle issues that have stuck around since an injury in late 2022. It seemed like I was at some appointment every few weeks.
This isn’t said to farm pity, but instead to relay an interesting finding I’ve had since leaving my job: it was as if my body had been storing up all this stress and tension and when I left, it was released. Some might say it was simply ignoring health signs while trying to write as a hobby outside of my demanding day job while juggling everything else. Possible. I doubt it, though. I’ve always been diligent and on top of my health.
Regardless of the physical pain from the health issues, the social issues are more difficult for me. Taking an unconventional path and stepping outside of a persona-lens through which others viewed me brought uninvited criticism, subtle jabs, passive-aggressive remarks, and the downstream flaring of inner complexes.
On Escaping Flatlands, Henrik Karlson wrote something that resonated quite heavily:
When people make unconventional decisions, it often feels like they are measured to another standard than those who follow the default script. If you do the normal thing and it fails you, then it isn’t your fault; it’s the system. But if you do an unconventional thing, even small, normal setbacks are read as proof of your foolishness. When a normal solution isn’t working, no one suggests you are wrongheaded for not trying an unconventional solution instead. But they will hold you accountable if you do something differently.
I know that it could always be worse.
I always manage to wake up with a smile, not get bitter, and push forward. Even on the days when I was in a lot of pain—emotional and physical—I moved forward. I always think to myself that if I can make it through when the times are hard, imagine what I could do when the issues no longer pervade my life?
All the pain sucks. But I’ll take the physical and social pain anytime if it means I get to keep writing and building a family with my best friend.
Accomplishments
My default mode of being is: “Move on, keep going, get better.” It has helped me get good at unknown things quickly. Though it also made for difficulty in being able to look at my accomplishments with a sense of satisfaction. In 2025, I managed to hold both attitudes at the same time: recognizing my accomplishments while still recognizing that I can get better. So I’ll allow myself to do that here, for a moment.
I wrote a 165k word novel this year. One part of me thought, “cool but you didn’t publish it.” But I genuinely felt a sense of accomplishment writing, The End, on the first draft. Shannon has helped me remember how to take satisfaction and pride in the work I do, which is something I’ve never done much of for myself in a long time. It makes it a lot easier now that I care intimately about the work I do. So, to finish writing my first novel brought the feeling of satisfaction and pride that I haven’t felt in a long time. I nearly forgot what it felt like, to be honest.
I managed to finish a short story and then a novella of 40k words (which teeters in novel territory) and published both to my newly created fiction Substack.
I didn’t write either with the intention of getting traditionally published, or gaining a massive audience or readership, but rather with targeted improvements in aspects of storytelling and prose. It also allowed me to see how it would feel to publish a story both for me, and how others around me react to it. In 2025, I learned to look at something like that and recognize that this is a big accomplishment, despite how others might define success.
Despite social challenges and annoying health issues that persisted, I accomplished a lot and made a significant mark on the story of my life. I met some really cool people who are also writers that I now get to call friends, I developed a stronger writing and feedback process, I started taking golf more seriously which has served as a great humility ritual, and I developed a strong plan to aspire to the person I want to be in my career.
Looking Back on The Frontier Letter and Forward on Writing
There are two distinct approaches within me: the wild and creative artist and the orderly and industrious businessman.
I see both sides vying to look back on The Frontier Letter differently: one wants to look back on the year in metrics and stats, which, when done that way, feels modest: 40 new readers joined us this year (though in percentages that’s 30%… nice!).
The artist says: who cares about the stats, 1 more person is amazing! That’s a whole person! A whole person who dedicates time to reading what you have to say.
Because I think it’s harmful to define success by social media metrics—especially because I have an obsessively critical mind, and therefore, I’m always in a dance with some way that I could improve my writing and myself—I choose not to.
Instead, I want to thank the 130 of you that have been here since before 2025, and the 40 of you who decided to join in 2025 for reading and deciding to stick around. I don’t say it lightly when I say that I think this is a miracle, and I won’t for a second let that be taken for granted.
Thank you all. I will continue to give it my best.
Looking forward
I am going to start live streaming every two weeks for three primary purposes:
1. Think out loud about interesting ideas
2. Become comfortable speaking publicly about my writing and work
3. Connect with and answer any reader questions
You can find me livestreaming on Substack the first and third Friday of every month at 4:30 PM CST time. If I cannot make that time (like this week), I will revert to that week’s Thursday. If that Thursday happens to be a holiday (also like this week), I will instead do it the following week.
So, I will start on Friday, January 9th at 4:30 PM CST.
I will send out the livestream recordings along with some notes within a few days of the livestream.
If you’re interested in different ways of planning, I found a method that blows others away. It’s the Harada method. It’s much more aligned with how I see goals: targeting a person you want to become and implementing habits to become that person.
I developed a Harada grid (inspired by Shohei Ohtani) with the aspiration to become a bestselling author. I managed to grind my way through jobs I didn’t care too much about. Now, I aspire towards something truly meaningful and energizing, with a far superior level of ambition, discipline, and love for the work I do. If it takes 10 years, so be it. I’m excited to look back year after year to see how well I progress, but more importantly, how much impact I’m able to make on people’s lives with my writing, and the relationships I develop and nourish with the amazing people I’ve met and continue to meet.
My primary career focus in 2026 is making a run at getting traditionally published; I have 2 novels planned for 2026, and I will be writing and speaking about some of the interesting ideas in those novels through the year on the Frontier Letter and on the live streams. I will continue to write essays here and may produce occasional flash fiction based on my writing exercise responses on Frontier Stories.
In 2024, I wasn’t exactly sure about where I was headed, but I freed the full force of the inner creative to help discover what it was. In 2025, I found what that career path was, and I made a commitment to it. In 2026, I hope to look back with a smile, despite the struggles that arise, knowing that I’m taking strides to make an impact with my writing.
Have a great end to your year, and I’m excited to get after it in 2026.
Happy New Year, everyone.
See you in 2026!
Dom
Looking forward to those livestreams. Keep it up, Dom!
I want info on the harada method, pls 🙏🏼