2026: Here’s our plan
The Substack version of Unflappable has been around for nearly two years. In 2024, I began with a set of goals for my time away from work and then revisited them several months later.
As 2024 came to a close, I imagined that 2025 would be centered around writing, although I did not know what form it would take. I’m still amazed that Unflappable: Soaring Beyond a Diagnosis became a reality last year.
Now that we are here, in 2026, let’s talk about the high-level plan, what we’re aiming to accomplish this year. As usual, I’ll be sharing this journey with all of you—what I learn and discover, observations and themes that connect to my life to yours.
Goodbye beads, hello new kitchen
My wife is a business owner and solopreneur—and I’m her consultant/bookkeeper/developer. Acquiring the bead business was a big leap, one that required a lifestyle adjustment. Our house is, functionally, a warehouse. The scale is challenging for people to imagine until they see it in person: 11,000 different products and somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000 individual items. Mind you, this is only what is currently listed online. There’s even more back stock, which is why we have a shipping container parked in front of our house.
Helping Lindsay acquire, move, and stabilize the business over the past 4 years has been full of surprises and I’ve learned more than I ever would’ve expected about the wide array of products used to make beaded art and jewelry. Our walls are full of color and texture—neon, metallic, translucent, matte. I enjoy looking at these objects even as I lack the skill to make anything out of them. We live in a gallery of sorts and every wall is a display, filled with hundreds and hundreds of items.
Not everyone would want to work with their spouse or live in their business, but we’ve had a good run. We’re able to solve problems together, we craft goals and work together on marketing; we strategize and bounce ideas off each other. I’ve had great fun supporting her, watching how deftly she can (simultaneously!) manage sales, customer support, and shipping workflows. She also knows where everything is, which is amazing.
But online retail is a tough landscape these days. In the beading space, consolidation, tariffs, and demographic changes have been squeezing out smaller players. Early on, Lindsay had two part time employees, downsized to one and then none. We tried to stabilize and then grow, but only managed to succeed at the prior. Sales have been on the decline and the workload investment no longer matched up with the return. So my wife decided to close down the main site, liquidate everything, and then refocus on a narrower set of higher margin items—after taking an extended vacation.
The beads are both a catalyst and dependency for the next BIG project: a full kitchen remodel. It’s a catalyst because the sale of the remaining inventory will help fund the project, and a dependency because work cannot start until the beads are gone. Like the business inventory, the scale of the kitchen project is large—every surface in a space that’s nearly 300 sq ft, the second largest in our modest house. The design-level planning began back in 2021, as I was learning 3D modeling in Sketchup. I picked the design work back up a few months ago, slowly adding more detail, refining the model, creating a template for discussion and decision making.
With the design nearly complete and planning underway, demolition will hopefully start in April, and I am confident that the new kitchen will be a reality by late summer or early fall 2026.
A bit of travel
My hope is to travel to Honduras and fly with my friend Jacob, but the priority here is a real vacation for my wife. She’s been able to take day trips and weekenders, but the realities of her work have made it challenging to take extended time off. We are going to change that in 2026.
Last year I ventured to Colombia and France, worked in Chelan, and popped down to LA—but this year, Lindsay’s itinerary comes first. She wants to go to Hawaii. I might go, or I might stay home with the dog.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to the northeast or southeast states, so this year plan to spend a week or so on the east coast. I’ll be attending a HNCA conference in Boston, and perhaps visiting friends in New England, along with a stopover in Georgia to see family. If you live in/near these places and would like to meet up in July, please reach out.
The next writing project
I am going to write another book, the question is when. Just like the kitchen, there are dependencies. What I want to write is more ambitious than a memoir, more involved—there will be research, interviews, deep study—and it will resemble a full time job for a period of time. Right now from where I sit, I imagine it will take a solid year to write. Can you spot the impediment? I already have a full time job. In order to press pause on my current career, I’d need another mechanism to pay the bills (alas, we are not independently wealthy). This may be too far afield, beyond the realm of reasonable expectations, but I have some ideas and intermediary steps to try, experiments I’m going to run. And yes, I will share the details here—my plan, progress, setbacks, and successes.
I am excited to take on new challenges this year, to work with my hands, to design and then create in physical space. I’m fortunate to be married to a highly capable and independent woman, and I look forward to helping her wind down this venture and kickstart the next.
Lastly: Joel J Miller is one of my idols on this platform and I love this piece of his about personal libraries. Soon—in the next month or so—we will have a custom, full wall set of book shelves to house our collection of books.
Here’s what the living room wall looked like for the past 3.5 years…
And here’s what it will look like with our new shelving (imagine them filled with books):
Exciting times ahead!
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