New Year. Same Attack Surface.

Happy Sunday Friends!

Here’s one quote I’m musing on this week, two ideas, three favorites, and one question to take with you into the week ahead.

One Quote I’m Musing

“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best of yourself?”
| Epictetus

The New Year Lie (and the 3 a.m. truth)

Over vacation on the West Coast, I found myself awake between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. for no good reason.

It’s a terribly inconvenient time to be conscious.

But it’s also a little magical. Not quite morning. Night is just starting to lose its hold. The world is quiet enough that we can hear our own thinking again.

That’s when the honest questions show up, whether we want them or not:

What do we have to show for 2025?
Did we do what we set out to do?
Did we become the person we were capable of being?

If we’re honest, the answer is probably no.

Not because we’re uniquely broken. Because we’re normal.

Life got busy. Things intervened. Motivation faded. Old habits were hard to break. Familiar patterns reasserted themselves.

Then Epictetus walks into the room and asks the one question you cannot talk your way around:

How much longer are you going to wait?

The New Year trope says: new year, new me, everything will be different.

That’s false.

Calendars flip. Systems persist.

If we want a worthwhile 2026, we can’t feel our way into it. We have to engineer it.

2026 Through the Two-Sphere Doctrine

Here’s the clean frame for the year ahead:

Modern conflict is an infinite contest of influence punctuated by finite windows of engagement, with cyber and AI as decisive terrain.

That’s geopolitics.

It’s also our lives.

Sphere 1 is engineered. Not by fate. By incentives. Attention is the product, and we are the inventory.

• Sphere 1: Influence (infinite). Feeds, outrage cycles, status games, fear, AI hype, and the constant pressure to react right now. It never ends. We do not “win” it.

• Sphere 2: Engagement (finite). A project shipped. A habit installed. A relationship strengthened. A hard conversation handled. A real skill built. These happen in windows.

Most people try to brute force Sphere 2 while drowning in Sphere 1. They call it “a busy year.” It’s usually just unmanaged influence.

In security terms, it’s simpler than we want to admit.

The attack surface stayed wide open, and we acted surprised by the outcome.

So here are six quick ideas to help us make 2026 a banner year.

The Stoics had a name for this: chreiai, pronounced “KRAY-eye.” A short story, a clear lesson, and a memorable line.

Six Ideas to Take You Through 2026

Pick one of these per week. Not all six

1) Stop Having an Opinion About Everything

It’s morning. Coffee in hand. Brain still booting. We open our phone “just to check.”

Ten minutes later we’re deep in someone else’s argument, forming a strong opinion about a situation we can’t influence, involving people we’ll never meet, in a context we don’t fully understand.

And the hook is familiar. That little hit that whispers: I’m informed, I’m engaged, I’m in the arena.

Except we’re not in the arena.

We’re in the stands, yelling, and calling it awareness.

Not every packet deserves to be processed.

Tiny prompt: After we open the first app of the day, ask: “Is this worth an opinion?” If not, close it.
Filtering isn’t ignorance. It’s hygiene. If we try to process everything, we miss what matters.

2) Stop Giving Your Time Away

A calendar does what calendars do. It fills up. If we don’t fill it with our priorities, others will fill it with theirs.

A meeting invite lands with a vague title. We accept because it’s easier than pushing back. Fifteen people show up. Zero decisions get made. An hour disappears. Somebody says, “Great sync,” and we feel that specific kind of frustration that only comes from being robbed politely.

In any org we respect, time is treated like an operational resource.

Most of us let it leak like an exposed service in production.

If it’s not in the plan, it’s in someone else’s pipeline.

Tiny prompt: After you sit down to work, pick the one task that makes today count, and block off the time for it.
We don’t secure a network by intention. We secure it by controlling entry points. Your calendar is an entry point. Guard it like one.

3) Practice Discomfort on Purpose

There’s a moment right before we do the hard thing where the negotiating starts.

Not today. Not like this. We’re tired. It’s cold. Not feeling it right now.

Seneca would call that moment the training ground. Because it isn’t the cold shower or the early workout or the awkward conversation that matters. It’s the decision to do it anyway.

Start for two minutes. Two minutes is the trick. It bypasses the negotiation because we can do anything for just two minutes. Two minutes gets us into the flow and becomes ten. Ten becomes done. The habit begins to form.

That’s the point.

Discomfort is only terrifying from a distance.

Comfort is a dependency. Reduce dependencies.

Tiny prompt: After you feel resistance to a task, do two minutes anyway.
Strong systems get hardened before reality tests them. So do we.

4) Do Something for the Common Good Every Day

A teammate asks a “small” question. The kind that is easy to ignore because we’re busy.

We almost ignore it.

Then we answer. Two minutes. A link. A nudge. Later we find out it saved them hours and prevented a mistake.

Doing good daily compounds. Quietly at first, then all at once.

Stoicism isn’t just “be unbothered.”

It’s “be useful.”

Be the anomaly that improves the baseline.

Tiny prompt: After lunch, do one small act that reduces friction for someone else.
Resilience isn’t personal. It’s systemic. The best teams recover fast because they help each other.

5) Don’t Suffer More Than Necessary

There’s a conversation we don’t want to have. So we rehearse it for hours.

We run the worst-case scenarios. We write the villain monologues. We pre-feel the embarrassment. We build it into a mountain before we ever take the first step.

Then the moment arrives and we’re already cooked.

We stutter. We flub an easy line. We come in too hot, too quiet. Not because the situation is catastrophic, but because we walked into it stressed out beforehand.

It’s fine. Not perfect. We stumbled a little. Not catastrophic. Just… human.

The damage wasn’t the conversation.

The damage was the pre-load. We paid a perceived cost before the moment demanded a price.

Don’t DDoS yourself with what-ifs.

Tiny prompt: After you notice spiraling, write one sentence: “What’s the next controllable action?” Then do it.
We don’t win incidents by panic rehearsals. We win by calm triage and the next right action.

6) Reduce Desires for a Rich Year

We do the modern ritual.

Scrolling. Comparing. Wanting.

Someone else’s upgrade. Someone else’s reach. Someone else’s momentum. And suddenly our life feels insufficient, not because it is, but because we moved the baseline again.

Epictetus had it right: the more we need, the more the world can move us.

Happiness becomes a dependency.

Peace becomes conditional.

That’s a fragile system.

Less we need, less we can be moved.

Tiny prompt: After you want “more,” name one thing we already have that is enough.
Every dependency is an attack path. Reduce dependencies, reduce exploitability.

Two Ideas From Me

1. Calendars flip. Systems persist. Engineer the system.

2. Stop trying to win an infinite game. Win your windows and stay in the game.

3 Things This Week

Something to help you think, reflect, and act in your own voice.

1. CES is basically a briefing on the next terrain

   CES is openly framing 2026 as the year of AI agents, digital twins, and AI on devices, which is another way of saying: influence is leaving the screen and moving closer to the physical world. | CES

2. A reminder that skill without character is a liability

   Two U.S. cybersecurity professionals pled guilty to conspiring with the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware ecosystem.

   That’s not just a crime story. It’s a leadership story. Competence without ethics isn’t power. It’s danger. | Reuters | Dept. of Justice

3. Curated Intelligence (I built the tool I said I was going to build)

   I told you a couple musings ago that I was doing something about my drowning in media. Too many feeds, too many links, too many “must reads.” The weirder part is how many CEOs, executives, and senior leaders across industry, military, and government told me the same thing.

   So I built a platform to read the internet for me and only surface the top 1% that matters.

   It’s not another news aggregator. It’s an AI engine backed by eight focused agents I built into the system to analyze and grade content, filter noise, and produce BLUF + implications to move from reading to decisions.
   

   I call it Curated Intelligence.
   

   What I need is a way to filter myself out now that I’m at MVP stage. I need a cohort of 20 of you brilliant folks to use it at the highest tier for free in exchange for feedback on what's useful, what's missing, what am I fever dreaming about.
   If you want in:

   • Go to ci.orlabs.dev and create a free account

   • DM me (or reply): “I’m in. Username/email: __. Topics: __, __.”

   • I’ll upgrade you to the highest tier for 30 days (first 20)

I’ll do this manually for the first 20 of you who follow the steps. All I ask in return is honest, ruthless feedback so I can sharpen it.

One Question to Take Into Your Week

What is the biggest attack surface in your life right now, and what single control will you implement to shrink it this week?

Write it down. Put it on the calendar. Win the window.

If this reminded you of someone drowning in Sphere 1, forward it to them

Until Sunday, my friends.

Think Dangerously.
–e