Five techniques you can use this week to stay positive, build gratitude, and make the most of your time.
This year is off to a roaring start — fun and excitement, twists and turns, interesting opportunities, curveballs, and reconnections with people from different chapters of life. I love it.
I've been pulling together updated material for one of my favorite presentations: How to Make 2026 the Best Year of Your Life. It started back in 2008 when HubSpot's Brian Halligan asked me to do a company-wide talk on "Dan Tyre on Attitude." I asked a few coworkers if I had a particular attitude. The answer was a resounding yes — so I spent several weeks digging into the best research on positivity, gratitude, and optimism as a personal competitive advantage.
I showed up with 75 slides for a 50-minute presentation. I only made it through the first four slides in the first hour. But it landed well, and I've been refining it ever since — leaning into Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism, adding new data, new exercises, new stories. Life is harder in the modern era, and we need all the positive hacks we can get.
Here are five techniques you can put to work right now.
1. Be intentional
The secret to a great life is intentionality — and that's much harder to do than it sounds. It means deciding in advance what you want, then defining everything you need to do to get there. Thinking through priorities, goals, timelines, and resources is always easier when it's on paper.
If you have both the desire and a plan, there is not enough power in the universe to keep you from getting results. And even if the path isn't perfect, you'll learn so much along the way that you'll be happy with the outcome. Reese Witherspoon said pretty much the same thing from the stage at Inbound 2023 — and if it's good enough for Reese, it's good enough for us.
2. Write it down
Setting goals alleviates anxiety.
Two rules I live by:
Rule #1 — always solve problems by starting with the goal and working backward.
Rule #2 — if it isn't written, it doesn't exist.
Once you write things out, they become clearer, more distinct, and a lot less scary. Fear shrinks on paper.
3. Stop worrying about things that haven't happened
A massive amount of mental energy gets wasted on problems that never materialize. Worrying is just praying for something bad to happen. Presence of mind — staying focused on what's actually in front of you — eliminates a lot of needless noise.
4. Talk to yourself like someone you believe in
I've told thousands of people: "You are John Johnson. You can do anything." That's not a hollow affirmation — I genuinely believe it. And it's a heck of a lot more powerful than thinking someone might be able to pull something off. The way you speak to yourself matters. Make it count.
5. Take personal responsibility
No one can make you feel bad unless you let them. There are a lot of blamers out there — people who point fingers and complain about circumstances instead of solving problems. Those folks can be miserable on their own island. Your energy is better spent elsewhere.
Three more, because we're overachievers
We don't make mistakes — we fall into potholes. And the worst potholes are where the real learning happens. They also make the best stories.
Strike "I could have" and "I should have" from your vocabulary. Replace them with: Next time I will.
Build a Shameless Self-Promotion Folder. Collect the nice things people say about you — emails, messages, notes — and keep them somewhere easy to find. On the days you feel like a slug, open it. You are never as bad as you think you are.
And finally, some good advice I received recently that's stuck with me: Remind yourself every day — it's not a race. You are living life. Try to enjoy it.
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