I’m going into the new year as a 37-year-old.

The idea of “getting old” is coming up fast for me, and every single year when I look back on the year that was, I continually find myself saying, “damn, that went fast,” and feeling like the years get shorter and shorter and faster and faster with every passing year as my life stretches out forever onwards towards death.

A sombre thought, but it fires me up to do something about it—to make the most out of life, every single year.

2025 was a year of effort, but in a little bit of a different way.

It was a year of trying a lot of things. Failing, succeeding, periods of sustained effort, periods of quiet.

I started the year with a lot of trips, a lot of work, and I visited a bunch of new places throughout the year.

I went back home to Australia twice, did a lot of domestic Japan travel to places like Aomori, Hiroshima, the Central Alps, Hokkaido, even random places like Amami-Oshima. I went to Korea, the F1 in Japan, did more motorsport stuff this year, and so much more.

It was a hectic year of travel, as it always is, but this is the life I signed up for, and it’s the kind of life I enjoy.

But that’s what life is normally like for me, and this year was a little bit different. What this year taught me was that sometimes, more isn’t better.

This year's experiment

This year, more than any other year, the thing that got me to realise that was creative business.

I started planning and creating my new business mentorship program called The Creative Leap. It’s a brand trying to help creatives “make the leap” into doing their own thing—taking their passion and turning it into a full-time career while building a life they love. It’s an idea I had in my mind for a very long time—essentially, it’s teaching the creative path that I personally took in my career. And this year, I finally executed against it.

In the process of making it, I sunk a lot of time into crafting the brand and marketing around helping creatives take their creative businesses to the next level.

Largely, this was because I was kind of bored of talking about photography so much. I felt like I’d said everything I had ever wanted to say in photography, and perhaps it was time for something different—time for something new, I thought.

And so, I spent most of the year pivoting to TCL. I created a new YouTube channel, started making videos on it, spun up a different email list, started a new IG for it, created content for that—it was a completely different avenue and a completely different set of things to talk about.

It felt new. At least, in the beginning.

But somewhere along the way—quite quickly, actually—it turned into a bit of a drag.

It wasn’t the subject matter—I’ve spent the latter half of my creative career trying to convince my creative friends around me that they need to make more money and that I could help them.

Instead, I found myself frustrated at the mental fragmentation of having two different businesses and the mental gymnastics that come with that.

In my twenties, I quickly discovered that I’m the kind of person who enjoys novelty. I like discovering new things, new hobbies, new interests. I’m always the kind of person who tries something, and if I enjoy it, I’ll go whole-hog into the thing—research, buying the best gear to enable me to do the thing, getting the best teaching, the whole shebang. But I’ve always thought of all of these side-quests as “experiments.”

There’s something about approaching a new thing as an “experiment” that allows you to quickly associate or (more commonly) disassociate from it without having to get your emotions and values too heavily invested in it. This simple mindset shift allows you to be agile, nimble, and approach the world with an “I’ll take what works and discard what doesn’t” approach.

I’ve always been like this, and I always will be.

TCL, The Creative Leap, is and was another one of those experiments.

I went headfirst into making it a new brand, created a new mentorship, new marketing channels—the works. But even after a somewhat successful launch, I didn’t feel like it was worth it.

I thought there would be enough of my audience to sustain the crossover, but there wasn’t.

I thought I would enjoy the duality of talking about photography on one channel and creative business on the other, but I didn’t.

I thought I could manage the dissonance required to context-switch between two very different subject matters for an extended period of time, but I don’t.

Hindsight is 20/20, and more than anything else, I realised that by chasing this much novelty and building a completely new brand, I actually ended up destroying the very values I built my life on—freedom.

I no longer had freedom of time or the bandwidth to be creative in photography, and my photography business was also suffering because of it.

This year, I learned that there is a tremendous price to pay for splitting your business in two. It’s a price that, for me, as a solo creative who wants to remain solo and not have a team, is too much to pay.

Simplicity

And so, the greatest thing I learned in 2025 is that for me, simple is better.

Simple is clear.

Simple is direct.

Simple is straightforward.

Simple doesn’t mean easy; it just means that the path is obvious and everything is aligned.

So in 2026, my goal is simple—align the business back to what it should have always continued to be about: photography.

Marketing to creative professionals is too broad of a brushstroke for me to care about.

Rather, I should be going back to the photographers I’ve already cultivated an audience with and nurturing them instead.

The mentorship shouldn’t have been for “any creative”; rather, it should have been for photographers.

While making both YouTube and Instagram channels for TCL was a good idea at the time, it would have only been good if I had decided to do it exclusively, rather than trying to split my time 50/50.

And so, back to the drawing board I go—into a new year, with new learnings, a new approach, and a new experiment.

I don’t regret anything I created in 2025; experiments don’t really have regrets—they just have learnings and actions.

If anything, I’m excited to make my life a lot simpler, and if you’re a photographer, I hope you’re excited for it too.

Let’s have the best year of our lives. Let’s work hard.

See you in 2026.