A Personal Reflection Before 2026 Starts

When I sat down to look at everything I wrote in 2025, in Meller Notes, Project Management Compass, You Visible, on Medium, on LinkedIn, and on my website… wow, what a year. I realized 2025 was not just a sequence of posts.

It was almost an open lab about three layers of professional life. The mind trying to stay sane in a noisy world, the work trying to function inside systems that do not always help, and the reputation trying to exist in a world where if you do not show up, you are not called.

At the beginning, I thought I was just writing “one more text per week”.

Now, looking back, I see I was documenting a change in mindset, mine and of many people who read with me.

I can summarize the year like this. In Meller Notes I tested ideas about how to live, work, and think with more clarity.

In Project Management Compass I was breaking, piece by piece, the fantasy that projects are predictable machines, when in reality they are fragile human systems.

In You Visible I was talking to that group of professionals who do a lot, deliver a lot, but are still almost invisible outside their company.

And the other channels ended up being reflections of these three main points, always moving around management, leadership, career, technology, personal branding, and productivity.

This is the base I use when I look at 2026.

What 2025 taught me about the mind (and what I wrote in Meller Notes)

In Meller Notes, 2025 was the year when I poked, many times, this feeling that the mind is always late compared to life.

I wrote about happiness that cannot stand alone, without someone to share it with. I wrote about success that is not only career progress, but a taste for meaning.

I wrote about the lie of work life balance, showing that many times the problem is not a missing technique, it is too many commitments made to please everyone.

I wrote about the invisible prison of other people’s opinions, and how the fear of judgment makes a competent adult live like a teenager asking for approval.

I also came back many times to the topic of time. I talked about living in the present while looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, not as a postcard, but as a metaphor for our difficulty to be fully in one place without thinking about the next one.

I talked about the feeling of being “always late in life” even when, objectively, things are moving. I talked about the anchors we need to build before the crisis arrives, inspired by Dostoevsky, because waiting for chaos to discover what holds you is a dangerous game.

Another thread that connected the year in Meller Notes was how we think. I wrote about confirmation bias being amplified by AI, about how easy it is to use new tools to become more stupid, more sure of our own beliefs, and less open to different views. I wrote about truth as something uncomfortable, using Annie Duke, Daniel Kahneman, Naval and others as background.

The recurring point was simple, but uncomfortable. The brain did not come to this world to search for truth, it came to keep us comfortable and safe. Searching for truth is almost an internal rebellion.

When I put all these texts together, I see a very clear pattern. In 2025 I was trying, with you, to answer some stubborn questions. What is a professional life that is worth living when comparison is infinite, attention is limited, and time always feels short. How do we deal with this mix of real ambition, real tiredness, and a mind that invents threats where they do not always exist.

If 2024 was the year to talk a lot about productivity, 2025 was more the year to talk about perception.

Less “how to do more”, more “how to see better what is already happening in front of you”.

Meller Notes | Substack

What 2025 taught me about work, projects, and systems (and what I wrote in Project Management Compass)

In Project Management Compass, I spent a big part of the year breaking illusions in the project world.

I wrote a long series about PMBOK 7, that was saying goodbye, bringing each performance domain down to the ground of reality, and then I commented on the arrival of PMBOK 8 and what this shows about the direction of the profession.

I wrote practical guides about realistic planning, risk management without theater, integration between portfolio and strategy, and frameworks for project managers who do not want to only survive the status report, but build real credibility and influence.

I also wrote a lot about human systems inside formal systems. When I talked about the State of the Profession in 2025, about why 80 percent of AI projects fail, about why MVP became an excuse for bad products, the real question behind was always the same. Is the problem the method or the culture.

In many texts, it became clear that companies are very good at collecting frameworks and very weak at using those frameworks to make hard decisions.

There is no lack of canvas, there is a lack of courage to say “no” and accept the consequence.

Another block of content was around the emotional side of project work.

I wrote about how to stay calm when everything is going wrong, about the difference between managing tasks and leading people, about communication that really works in complex projects, about how to read the room, and about building trust in distributed teams.

When I talk about trust as an “invisible battery”, or about meetings where nobody has the courage to decide, I am trying to translate into simple language what systems theory, social psychology, and leadership studies have already explained for decades. There is no consistent delivery without a minimum level of psychological safety, clarity, and shared responsibility.

And of course, 2025 also brought a lot of content about AI in the context of projects and PMOs.

I wrote about the AI PMO Playbook, about how to measure success in AI projects beyond ROI, about skills for project managers in the AI boom.

The uncomfortable conclusion, again, is that AI is exposing incompetence much more than it is replacing people.

If the PMO does not even know which data exists, what the decision flow is, and who has authority over what, no tool will “save” the portfolio. At best, it will accelerate the chaos.

When I look at Project Management Compass in 2025, I see a clear line. I was trying to help you stop seeing a project as a sequence of deliverables and start seeing it as a sociotechnical system.

Part people, part process, part politics, part technology.

And I wanted to show that the project manager who understands this, and takes this position of translator between worlds, enters 2026 less dependent on chaos and more in control of their own career.

Project Management Compass | Substack

What 2025 taught me about reputation, visibility, and being seen (and what I wrote in You Visible)

In You Visible, 2025 was almost a gentle intervention with that person who does a lot, but almost no one outside the company knows it.

I wrote very clearly for the senior professional who hates the term “personal branding”, who thinks all this is a performance, but at the same time feels a quiet discomfort when they see less competent people taking the space that, deep down, they know they could take.

During the year, I wrote about how to build authority online without posting every day, about how to talk about your results without sounding arrogant, about the day you realize your career only exists inside one company, and about the gap between your real competence and what Google shows when someone searches your name.

I also went deep into more tactical topics, like how to choose themes to write about without getting stuck, how to turn questions into posts, how to use AI without losing your own voice, and how to build a visibility map that connects LinkedIn, newsletter, website, and public presence into something coherent, instead of a digital Frankenstein.

I created guides like the 30 Day Visibility Challenge, the Monthly Visibility Tracker, the Personal Brand 12 Questions Worksheet, the Post Structure Template, all with the same intention. To take visibility out of the vague “inspiration” field and put it into your routine, as a system.

And I wrote more conceptual texts, like the myth of “personal branding”, why the world loses when the most competent people stay quiet, why the future of leadership is public, and what authenticity really means in practice.

Always coming back to a point that I consider crucial. Visibility is not a show, it is the logistics of trust.

It is how you help the world understand what it can trust you with.

What I saw, writing for this audience, is that the problem is rarely lack of content.

Someone who has been in a field for 10, 15, 20 years has a huge internal library. The problem is the translation.

People who think well, solve hard problems, but do not find a comfortable way to put this into words.

So they stay silent, and the algorithm of life gives advantage to those who at least show up.

In 2025, You Visible was, in practice, an invitation to turn this accumulated competence into clear, frequent, honest signals.

So that in 2026 you do not continue depending only on people inside your company to see your value.

You Visible | Substack

What writing all this taught me about me and about you

Writing in three different channels, with different focuses, ended up being a public thinking experiment.

In Meller Notes, I tested what happens when you talk about career, philosophy, time, happiness, pain, and doubt without a corporate filter.

In Project Management Compass, I saw how it is possible to take systems theory, psychology, leadership patterns, and translate them into something that a tired project manager can read at night and think “ok, tomorrow I will try this in the meeting”.

In You Visible, I saw how much intelligent leaders struggle to talk about themselves in an honest way without feeling they are “showing off”.

Doing this week after week, I learned two important things.

The first one is that writing forces you to think with more precision, even when the text looks simple.

When I write “work is not neutral, it shapes you”, this fits in one sentence because before that I already went through dozens of examples, readings, conversations, collapsing projects and exhausted leaders to reach this summary.

The text you read is always the visible tip of something much more chaotic behind it. Writing forces you to organize this chaos.

The second thing is that many people are thinking the same thing, but in silence.

When I talked about the lie of balance, about the invisibility of those who work well, about the discomfort of leading without feeling “certain”, or about the temptation to use AI as a crutch, the feedback was almost always the same. “This is what I felt, but I did not have the words.”

In the end, what I do when I write is not bringing new concepts all the time.

It is trying to lend vocabulary to experiences you are already living.

This also changed how I look at 2026. Instead of wanting to write about “new things”, I am more interested in continuing to dig the same themes with more depth.

Mind, work, reputation. How we think, how we deliver, how we show up. The rest is detail.

Three ideas I do not want to leave in 2025

After a full year writing about all this, there are three ideas that I personally do not want to abandon when the calendar turns.

The first is that the mind needs space, not more stimulus. This appeared in almost all texts about focus, time, flow, overload, and anxiety.

If every small break becomes one more chance to consume, you never let your brain process.

Without these mental digestion spaces, you enter 2026 with more information, but with the same old confusion.

The second is that work is always shaping you, whether you see it or not.

When I wrote about meaningless jobs, about leaders who drain trust, about projects that start wrong, the message was this. The environment where you spend eight, ten hours per day is reshaping your view of the world, your habits, your tolerance for certain absurd things.

In 2026, saying “it is just a job” is maybe the most polite way to deny that this has a direct impact on who you are becoming.

The third is that reputation is being built even when you are not “working on your brand”.

Every email, every meeting, every silence, every time you share or do not share something you learned, all of that is feeding the image people build about you.

In 2025 I wrote a lot for those who still think they can ignore this dimension.

In 2026, the truth is that this will become even more visible. And those who start to treat visibility as part of the work, not as an ego game, will suffer less with the next waves of change.

So if I had to condense everything I wrote in Meller Notes, Project Management Compass, and You Visible into one sentence to carry into 2026, it would be something like this. Use the next year to take a bit more care with how you think, how you deliver, and how you show up, compared to 2025.

The rest, we will keep exploring together, text by text.

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