Burning the boats for the new year
Lessons from getting married and building a business in a hectic 2025.
The most consequential year of my life is coming to a close.
I’m lucky to have said the same thing at the end of 2024 — the year I quit my job to launch a media company, won a Fulbright award and proposed to my now-wife.
All that ended up being practice for what followed.
The first half of the calendar proved to be a head-rattling sprint and juggling act between running a business and planning a wedding from across the country.
Kaytlin and I were operating with half the usual timeline and double the stakes. We had relatives flying in from faraway lands like Hong Kong, Germany and England, many of whom had never before set foot in America.
The two of us — with work schedules filled to the brim and an ill-advised commitment to hosting regular dinner parties — spent every night and weekend parsing vendor contracts, building color-coded spreadsheets and shuffling seating charts.
If it had been clear in January just how much work the wedding would require, we may have thought twice before committing to such a compressed docket.
Fortunately — if painfully — we underestimated everything except ourselves.
And once something of this scale is set in motion, only two outcomes remain: tragic abandonment or smashing success.
After marrying in July, the world suddenly opened up, a consequence of both the peace that comes with marriage and the pragmatic result of tripling my mental bandwidth and free time.
Business boomed, I launched my own show and became a regular across a handful of financial news channels.
In August, I even had the opportunity to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange, which meant I got to sign the legendary wall in the stairwell leading up to the bell podium.
Every passing month further confirmed that momentum is a lagging indicator.
You only experience the wins, the adrenaline and sighs of relief when the work is already done. Progress is almost always invisible in the present moment and then glaringly obvious in retrospect.
I know if I can hold onto that lesson, I’ll be better at all the things that matter most as a professional, as a husband, and as a man.
Three lessons crystallize as I write this today.
1. Commitment expands capacity
The wedding forced a level of decisiveness that bled into everything else.
The schedule moved so fast and offered such little wiggle room that I (we) had no choice but sharpen our priorities.
Optionality fell away but I ended up doing fewer things, better. With that came less noise and a ban on second-guessing.
The intensity of that season also revealed just how elastic our work capacity can be. But we wouldn’t have known it without committing to the mammoth task of the wedding.
New bandwidth comes from self-imposed, extreme pressure.
2. Burn the boats to make progress
Similar to the above lesson, the wedding as well as several choices made in the business confirmed to me that forward motion begins at the point of no return.
Once a decision become irreversible or too expensive to unwind, everything snaps into place.
Execution is no longer tied to motivation and becomes instead a matter of necessity.
Building in an escape hatch invites procrastination and shrinks the inevitable.
3. Leverage comes from consistency
The newsletter and show — and so, the business — have worked because they shipped on a fixed cadence.
Predictability builds trust, which amplifies reach, which creates leverage.
Traction comes from showing up without negotiating mood or energy.
Nothing meaningful happened after publishing my favorite articles or episodes. The inflection points would always come later, a result of a growing library and track record.
My life improved because of choices that narrowed rather than expanded my options.
In years past I’d try to keep as many doors open as possible. But recent history has taught me the value in closing the right ones.
It seems true that the life you want will only appear when you remove every alternative.
Thank you for reading, watching and supporting my work this year.
I will work hard to make sure the best is yet to come.
Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2026.
Phil Rosen
Co-founder, Opening Bell Daily
You’re amazing, Phil! Keep it going in the new year!