Life Beyond the Briefs

How To Plan 2026 So You Actually Love It

• Brian Glass

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The rush to “do more” is loud, but the quiet work of designing a year you actually want to live is louder. We break the high achiever cycle—always chasing 2x—by starting with gratitude, then building a plan that respects seasons of life, family, and the reality of running a law practice without becoming its prisoner.

First, we look back. Pull up your photos and calendar to build a 2025 highlight reel and remind yourself how much good you already lived. From that steadier place, we map the core “gardens” of life—business, finances, health, relationships, growth, adventure, and environment—and define what a true 10 out of 10 looks like in each. You’ll hear practical examples for setting clear metrics and feelings that prove progress, plus simple ways to capture weekly wins so momentum doesn’t get lost.

Then we choose a Masogi: one bold, year-defining challenge with a real chance of failure. Whether it’s your fastest marathon in a decade, that first million in revenue, or coaching your kid’s team, we show how to pick it, put it on the calendar, and make it public so accountability does its job. From there, we swap outcome obsession for activity excellence. You’ll get an easy growth cadence—one referral lunch, three handwritten notes, five thoughtful posts each week—and a health and relationship rhythm you can actually sustain. We focus on quarterly lifts for the lowest-scoring areas rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Finally, we talk time. Big rocks go on the calendar first—vacations, family events, races, retreats—so trials and tasks don’t swallow your life. If you run your firm, teach your team to guard their time, too. The law doesn’t have to be a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie; the real prize is a rich life shared with people you love. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a lawyer who needs permission to plan boldly, and leave a review with your 2026 Masogi.

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, my friends, and welcome to another episode of Life Beyond the Reefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually like showing up to on Mondays. My name is Brian Glass, and if you're new here, it's been a while actually since I've done an introduction or a reintroduction to who I am, why I create this show, and really what it is that I'm trying to accomplish with this. So I have a car crash practice in Northern Virginia. I am uh law partners with my dad who has an ERISA long-term disability practice. In addition to running the law firm, we run a company called Great Legal Marketing, which is dedicated to helping solo and small law firm owners create great firms, the kinds of firms that they actually want to show up at. And the niche that we serve is generally lawyers and law firms that are doing somewhere, you know, starting at maybe a half million dollars a year, um, we can begin to help you up to about five million a year. And we help lawyers um reach the inflection points. And, you know, I don't like to focus on the revenue, but the revenue points really tend to be the inflection points in the firm. Like at a million dollars in revenue, you can afford to hire enough staff that you don't have to take all the phone calls, you don't have to do all the intake and sales, you don't have to answer your phones at dinner or your emails uh while you're on vacation. So million dollars is important. Three million is important because you start to get into that next level of maybe middle management. Maybe you have a COO, sometimes it's called an implementer, sometimes it's a director of operations. You almost certainly have a marketing director and not a marketing assistant who's just out of college at the$3 million mark. And then the$5 million mark, you tend to scale out of what we teach. Um, frankly, I haven't gotten to the$5 million mark yet myself. We will next year. Um, but because we've never gotten to the$5 million mark, I'm not one of these coaches that bullshits my way to trying to help people do things that I haven't done. So um, that's what we're doing at Great Legal Marketing. And this episode is designed not so much for the law firm owner, but but for the lawyer. So I began producing this show about two years ago as a way of talking to the lawyer that was three to ten years behind me. So for context, I'm 42. I have three kids, been married 16 years, kids are 12, 10, and 7. Um, and I take a lot of time out of the office to participate in their activities. So I coach whatever they're playing. We take a lot of trips, um, and I like to spend uh and I make it home for dinner just about every night. Um and so I think there's a gap in the market um and a gap in the knowledge base for lawyers who are in their you know early 30s to mid-30s to 40, who want to be great lawyers, great business owners, and also great parents, and also be in shape, um, and who want to have it all at the same time. And I'm here to tell you that you can have most of it throughout the course of your life. It's very hard to have it all at the same time because life comes in seasons. Um, but that's why I began producing this show is for you know the person who's again, you know, mid-30s to 40. Um, and it's helpful if you're beyond that. But really, when I'm talking, I'm envisioning somebody who's 30 to 40 in my mind and trying to walk them through the problems that I had when I was between 30 and 40. All right. And so today's episode is about how to set yourself up for great 2026. And uh a couple episodes back, I did um a session on all the numbers that I would want to know if I were the law firm owner going into annual planning. And I don't want to make this episode centric to law firm owners, right? I want to have this to have broad application um across lawyers, law firm owners, and even if you're not a lawyer, I think you will get a lot out of this. So, this is my approach to annual planning. And there's a couple things that I do um that are outside of the office and away from numbers and away from cases and files and people, frankly, that I think are helpful to you to take a step back and figure out like what the hell do I actually want out of my life? The first step in annual planning is not to figure out what we're gonna do in 2026. The first step is gratitude and reflection on 2025. Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Gap in the Gain, that which nailed this problem for high achievers, which most lawyers are, and entrepreneurs, which the segment of lawyers are, which is that we are always, always, always moving the goalposts. So if you did a million dollars in revenue in 25, you immediately want to do 1.2 to 1.5 in 2026, right? There's there's this survey or study that's you know, ask people like what's the amount of money that you think you would need to make or to have as your net worth in order to feel financially secure. And across the board, no matter how much money you make or how much money you have, the answer is always 2x. Across the board, you have 3 million, it's six. If you have 5 million, it's 10. If you have 100,000, it's like, oh, if I just had 200,000, I would feel great. Um, but across the board, it's at least two X because we're always looking at what we want to have or what we think we can achieve. And we don't spend enough time looking back at what we have or what we did. And so the very first thing that I want you to do as you're sitting down to get ready for your 2026 is to look back at 2025. Best two ways to do this are to open your uh camera roll and open your calendar. So on the phone, go into the camera roll and just scroll through all of the pictures from January 1st, 2025 through whatever day you're listening to this. Open your calendar, either in Outlook or Google, or if you keep a physical calendar, if you have a journal, open that up and flip through. And what I want you to do is write down all of the good things that happen to you. Create your own highlight reel for 2025. And you should be able to find a bunch of stuff that you have already forgotten about. I promise you, you will find things you've trips you forgot you took, games that you forgot you went to, dinners with friends you forgot you have. And it's important that we remind ourselves that there are all of these little things in our lives because it's so easy to remember how hard it is that we have, how hard we have it today, right? And the problems we're trying to solve today. And it is so easy to forget about the good times that we've had. So the very first step before you sit down and put pen to paper on a single goal for 2026 is create your highlight reel for 2025. What is all of the cool shit that you did in 2025 that you want to make sure you remember? Now, in 2026, the opportunity that you have to increase your memory of these things is to keep better track of them. I use a passion planner. I love this journal. I just got um I just got my planner for 2026. It's got a week-by-week breakdown, and then it's got a monthly kind of recap thing. And my favorite part about this journal is that it's got a square in every week for good things that happen. As you're going through your planner and writing out all the things you have to do this week, it's got a little square that reminds you there was some good shit that happened last week. Why don't you write it down here? Right. At the end of every month, it asks you again, what are three great things that happen? And you have this log of the things that happen week in and week out. So that will help you throughout the course of the year remembering all of the good things that happen. I think on the quarterly check-in page, there's probably like there's probably something similar to it, right? So it gives you the opportunity in a more than once a year fashion to go back and review all the good things that happened to you. So again, before you do anything for 2026, let's take a look and take a moment for 2025. And if you want to be, you know, a real overachiever, a player, text some of the people that were involved in your 2025 highlights, tell them how much you are grateful for them. So that's that's the first thing is the recap. The second thing for me is doing, you know, what I call like, what is my 10 out of 10, right? Um, there's a couple different ways to do this. And I've done it um in different fashions uh and with more categories or less categories at various times in my life. But you you have all of these areas of your life. You have business, you have your health and nutrition, you have your spiritual, you have your relationships with your friends and your family, you have your adventure and your lifestyle things and your travel, you have uh personal growth and intellectual, you have your financial, how well are you doing? What does your bank account look like? And you have um your environment. Like when you go home at night, do you have somewhere that you're happy with? Is your is your house set up the way that you want it to? Do you have a calm place where you can go and do work? Do you have a place that's a retreat, or is your place, you know, a complete mess because your kids, like my kids, sometimes have just destroyed it? And so what I want you to do is categorize each of those categories that are important to you, right? Sometimes they're called like the gardens of your life. And you may have more and you may have less, and you may go into ChatGPT and ask for like, what is a list of all the categories that I want to consider? And I want you to write down for yourself what would a 10 out of 10 in each of those categories look like? So, for instance, in your financial category, what is 10 out of 10 for you in 2026? How much money do you want to make? How much money do you want to save? How much money do you want to spend? What do you want to spend that money on? What kind of experiences do you want to buy? And you're gonna do that for each category, um, each category of each garden of your life, right? So your fitness, what do you want your fitness to look like? How many pull-ups, push-ups do you want to be able to do if that's your thing? How fast do you want to be able to run a mile? How long do you want to be able to run for? Do you have a race that you're training for? Right? What does it mean to be 10 out of 10 for you? And we're gonna put that aside and we're gonna come back to it. The third thing, and this is a a uh it's a Japanese and tradition that was popularized a couple of years ago by Jesse Itzler, uh, is called a Misogi. And Masogi is the one very hard year-defining thing that when you look back from 2045, you will say, in 2025, this was the thing that defined my year. Um, so for me in 2025, my Masogi was running a marathon faster at 42 than I did at 32. And I tried and I finished the marathon, and I failed to run as fast as I did at 32. And that's okay. Um, you know, I think I think I read somewhere that the Masogi ought to, number one, ought to have a reasonable risk of failure. Anything that doesn't have a reasonable risk of failure isn't actually, I think, very fun for most high-achieving people. Um, and I I've read, you know, anything anywhere up to like a 50-50 chance that you fail at it, right? Um and it I think most of mine in the past have gravitated towards fitness things. Um, you know, I I ran a uh the in the Spartan World Championships in Greece uh one year, I had the marathon last year, and then for 2026, the Masogi that I'm choosing is getting in the best shape of my life, getting down to 190 pounds and 15% body fat um from 210 and somewhere in the 20s. Um and so take some time with this and think about what is the thing that if I achieved it in 2026 would define my year, and I could look back and say in 2026, this is the year I did X. It might be my firm did a million dollars in revenue, it might be I got a coaching license and coached my kids' soccer team. It might be that you ran a marathon or an Iron Man or you swam across the English channel. I don't know what it is for you, but there's one thing that scares you, and it should scare you, um, that would define your year. And so pick that thing out and tell people about it. This is the big accountability piece. Like, you know, how many, how many people do you know that have said forever, I want to run a half marathon, or I want to run a marathon, or I want to run an Iron Man? It's like, no, just pick the thing out, put it on the calendar, and tell everybody in your network that you're running the race on that day. Like it's not that hard. And then your mind will figure out like, how do we get a training plan? And um, and you will have the the social risk of loss, social risk of not having done the thing that will encourage you to actually go out and train for it. Um, so I'm a big, big accountability piece, but it's not really, you don't even really need like the traditional accountability partner for that. You just need to put into the world that you're going to do the thing so that you know when you get to Thanksgiving and you haven't done it, you have people who will look at you and say, but you said that 2025 or 2026 is gonna was the year that you were going to do X, right? Um, so pick your thing. It's called a Masogi. Uh, it's an old Japanese ritual, and uh, I think every year you should have something on the calendar that's really hard. Do you have a reasonable risk of failure? Um, that that you build the rest of the year around, and that when you are successful, actually will define your year. The other uh the last piece, last piece of this is coming back to your 10 out of 10 list. Okay. And this is something that you probably won't do on an annual basis because it is hard to do all of the things exceptionally well all of the time. And so what I like to do is each quarter pick one of the lower scores and try to raise it, right? What is the thing I would need to do to raise uh if I said 10 out of 10 and my my financial life is uh is X, um what do I and I'm and I'm currently sitting at like a three, like I'm pretty unhappy with how we're doing financially. Um, what are the things that I need to do in order to raise it? And the important part is um is figuring out what that activity piece is, right? Because you don't control the outcomes. And the more that you are committed to or invested in the outcome versus the activity, the less likely you actually are to hit the goal. And so really the most important part of any annual or quarterly goal setting is figuring out I said most important part. The two most important parts are what do you want and then what do you have to do to get it, or who do you have to become in order to get it? Because as we as you move up the law firm growth ladder, there are times where you you just can't do all the things, you know? There's only so many hours in the day, right? 24 hours in a day, you're sleeping eight of them, you're eating two of them, you know, you're you're working out and showering another one or two of them, you have kids, right? That perfect look there's only so many hours in a day that you can do stuff, right? And this um often the thing that that needs to happen on your calendar is that you take things off. Uh 2026, maybe is the either you stop doing some kind of activity, right? Um, but figuring out first what is it that you want, and then what's the activity that you have to engage in, or the person that you have to become in order to achieve that result. And then you don't become, you don't get dedicated to the result, you get dedicated to performing the activity week in and week out. Like Alarc Ramosy uh says, if you created content once a day for the next year and posted it, there's no way you would not be successful in achieving whatever financial goal you want to do at the end of the year. And I'm I'm bastardizing that quote a little bit. Um, but if you were trying to generate new business in your law firm and you committed every week to going out to lunch with a referral source, and every week to sending three handwritten notes, and every week to posting five times on social media, be it LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, whatever your social media of choice is. And those are the three activities you were going to engage in: weekly lunch, three thank you letters, and and posting five times a week on some social media. It would be hard to imagine that you got to the end of that 52-week cycle and you did not have more business coming in from referral sources. It's just it's it's just hard to imagine that, right? And so the goal isn't I want to 2x my referrals or 3x my referrals or whatever. The goal is I want to be somebody who engages in these three activities on a religious basis, week in and week out, because I know that if I do those things, it will lead me to that result. And so I think you know, probably on a quarterly basis, I would start to pick off what are the two gardens of my life where I have low scores, where I am not near my 10 out of 10. And what is the activity that I can put towards that in order to raise those scores, right? Because again, if you if you are fat and poor and unhealthy and unhappy, um it's hard to change all of those things within the span of a quarter, right? And so pick one and start to work on one. Uh and you probably need more than a quarter, depending on where you're starting on. But I would pick one or two categories that I wanted to focus on. Pick the activity and run at that activity for the first 90 days of the year, and just see where I land on the other side of those 90 days. All right, and here's the last piece. This is maybe a little bit out of order. I'm trying to do this all in one shot because I don't have an EA this week. Um but put the big important shit on your calendar first. This is uh you know, lawyers we don't take enough vacation days, we don't take enough time out of the office. Um, especially like if you're on the defense side and you're being honest, a lot of you guys are saying that you have no trial dates available for 13 or 18 months because every week you have something coming up. Now, I I'm not entirely convinced that's 100% honest, but let's take you at your word that you are. If you don't block out that time on your calendar for vacations 13, 18 months out, it's just gonna get swallowed up by other work. This is kind of what they tell you is the normal when you're coming out of law school and sitting for the bar and getting sworn in, is that you know the law is a jealous mistress, right? Well, but only if like we have control. You have you have agency in your life, and you are allowed to say, I'm blocking this time off. Now, if you're in one of these firms where you don't have a lot of control over your life, you just gotta make sure you do it from the from the very beginning and that you are militant about guarding that time for yourself and for your family, or getting out of a firm like that, right? But if you work for yourself, there's no excuse not to block time and safeguard your time and protect the time for you and your family, because your kids are only gonna get older every day and will be out of the house soon. And there are only 18 summers with your kids to do the kinds of things that you are working this hard in your life and in your law firm to be able to do. Uh, and so just kind of as a bonus, within all the annual planning, if you are uh you're looking down at your calendar and you have open time, like block it off now. Block it, block it now. Pick the trip, uh, fuck it, book it, as I like to say, and um and figure it out later. Like, I don't know, we're going on spring break somewhere, probably just buy a plane ticket and then figure the rest of it out later. Um, those are uh those are the principles to making your 2026 as much fun as it can be. Is look first of all, look back at 2025 and reflect on all the good things that have happened to you in 2025. Reach out to the people who helped make those things happen. Tell them that you are thankful for them. Number two, look at all the gardens of your life and write down for yourself what would a 10 out of 10 actually look like and what's the activity that would lead me to my 10 out of 10 result. Number three, pick a Masogi. Pick something hard to do for the year and work your way towards that hard thing. Tell people about it. Tell people that you are going to achieve a certain result in 2026, uh, shoot your shot, as they say, and um, and work towards it. And lastly, carve that time on your calendar. We don't work this fucking hard to be slaves to just working more hard, right? The law is um is a pie eating contest sometimes where the prize is more pie, and uh, and I say bullshit, no, the prize is that you get to live a really rich, wealthy life and experience all that the world has to offer with the people that you like experiencing with. So, my hope for you is you have an amazing New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, and that you have a prosperous and healthy and gratitude filled 2026. Happy New Year, my friends.

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Brian Glass

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