Thirteen speaking events across six countries. My seventh MVP award. Taking on new mentees. Thousands of pages of books and blogs read. Twenty-two hours of flight time. On paper, 2025 looked productive.
Writing a year-in-review means confronting uncomfortable truths. It means admitting that leaving Data Masterminds wasn’t just about reaching “the end of the road” - it was about finally acknowledging I’d been on the wrong road. And it means recognizing that shutting down Knee-Deep in Tech after eight years didn’t bring the grief I expected, but relief so profound it made me question what I’d been doing with my time. So let me take you through 2025 - the stats, the wins, the losses, and most importantly, what I learned about the difference between being busy and doing work that matters.
What The Numbers Actually Meant #
Each of those thirteen stages taught me something about what I want to be known for - and crucially, what I’m done trying to be. At DataMinds Connect in Mechelen, Valerie Junk and I delivered a workshop on data literacy that had nothing to do with the latest Azure service and everything to do with how humans actually make decisions with information. The feedback was among the best I’ve ever received.
The MVP award felt different this time. Not because Microsoft changed anything, but because I finally feel like I’m contributing on my own terms rather than performing for an audience. Finally, the tail is no longer wagging the dog.
I had the absolute pleasure of mentoring two phenomenal people from the community. Evgenia delivered her first session on governance, Tim his first on data and AI literacy. Mentoring clarifies what you actually know versus what you just repeat. Watching them prepare forced me to articulate why certain principles matter, not just what those principles are. They both knocked it out of the park with their sessions, and I take great pride in having been a small part of the first steps of their speaker journeys. To be fair, it’s not really hard to be a mentor when you keep being assigned exceptional mentees.
I have tried to up my reading game this year. I still have nightmares from “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davies, but “Slow Productivity” by Cal Newport gave me hope I might be on the right path. Blogs from the likes of Kurt Buhler, Valerie Junk, and James Serra (to mention just a few) help me stay abreast of developments in the BI/analytics world.
And those twenty-two hours in the cockpit? Flying is pure decision-making in a consequence-rich environment. You check the weather, you plan the route, you execute, and you adapt when something changes. There’s no room for pretense, no place for data theater. That’s why I keep coming back to it.
Private Life: Questioning Established Truths #
In May, I did something I never thought I would do - I ran my first race. “Only” 5 kilometers, but for someone who decided at age 12 that he couldn’t run, 5K was everything.
Let me be specific about that decision: I was slow in school athletics. The other kids lapped me. I hated running. I decided this meant I was “not a runner” and carried that identity for 30 years. Thirty. Years.
Think about that.
I made a permanent decision about my capabilities based on being a slow 12-year-old.
Here’s what’s fascinating about outdated identity narratives: they’re self-reinforcing through a mechanism psychologists call “identity protection.” When we establish an identity - even a limiting one like “I’m not a runner” - our brain treats challenges to that identity as threats. It’s not laziness or lack of willpower. It’s our cognitive system doing exactly what it evolved to do: maintain a coherent sense of self.
The problem is that coherence and accuracy aren’t the same thing. A 12-year-old struggling in gym class becomes “evidence” that running isn’t for you. You stop trying, which means you never improve, which confirms the original assessment. The narrative becomes unfalsifiable - not because it’s true, but because you’ve stopped collecting contradictory data.
This matters because it’s the exact same pattern I was running in my professional life. I’d been carrying around “I’m a deeply technical presenter” as an identity since 2015, when I was working in a completely different landscape with completely different skills. That version of me made sense then. He doesn’t now. But I kept performing that identity because challenging it felt like admitting I’d been wrong about who I was.
Then I came across a book that blew my mind. “The Courage To Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga deals with Adlerian psychology and how that completely upends the concept of self and relations. It turned out to be a missing piece for my own personal transformation, and I can highly recommend it. It is deceptively easy to read, though - accepting and internalizing the concepts and thoughts expressed within is another matter entirely.
Five years ago, I decided I wanted to become fit enough to run comfortably. I sought out the worst possible weather to ensure it was as uncomfortable as it could be. I used my deep dislike for running to drive me forward, and over time, I grew to like it instead of hating it.
When I crossed that finish line in May, I wasn’t just completing 5K. I was proving to myself that the stories we tell about who we are and what we can do are data points, not destiny. I’m now running 10-15K comfortably (not fast, mind you), and I’m eyeing a half-marathon in 2026.
Professional Life: The Year I Stopped Performing #
The professional highlight of 2025 wasn’t an achievement - it was a series of departures.
We completed episode 300 of Knee-Deep in Tech in front of a live audience in Stockholm. After celebrating, we all felt drained. We’d started the podcast thinking it would die after two weeks; eight years and 312 episodes later, we officially shut it down in June.
I expected grief. I expected a feeling of emptiness. Instead, I felt relief so profound it made me question everything. The podcast wasn’t the problem - I was. Or rather, the version of me that kept saying yes to things because they seemed important, because the community “expected” it (they didn’t), or because I’d always done it.
Here’s what three years at Data Masterminds taught me: when you can’t say no to the wrong work, you end up doing a lot of it. Most clients wanted a technology partner - someone to implement the shiny new tool. What they needed was a data partner - someone to tell them their foundation was broken and what it would actually cost to fix. The foundation isn’t sexy. It isn’t conference-worthy. So they wanted data theater instead: dashboards that look impressive, overly complex ETL pipelines that gave the impression of being flexible, and the appearance of being data-driven without the discomfort of actually changing behavior based on what the data says.
That work isn’t for me anymore.
I’ve spent 28 years in the data space, and I’ve rarely seen organizations genuinely use data to challenge their assumptions rather than confirm them. The work that actually matters - helping people understand what their data can and cannot tell them, building literacy around uncertainty, teaching decision-makers to distinguish signal from noise - that work doesn’t fit neatly into project proposals or statement of work documents.
I left Data Masterminds in November. I wrote a post on LinkedIn about it being “the end of the road of what was possible to achieve with that organization,” which is true but incomplete. The fuller truth is that I’d spent three years trying to fit a version of myself that organization needed, and that version increasingly felt like an ill-fitting costume I put on in the morning. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an awesome place with some truly exceptional people. It’s just no longer for me.
The blog resurrection has been my laboratory for figuring out what I actually want to say. Eight posts since the restart in late October, including this one. Instead of tightly scoped technical walkthroughs, I’m writing about concepts: how LLMs work (and what they’re good for), why rituals matter for performance, how sugar and AI share common trajectories, and why neurochemistry matters for presentation skills.
This isn’t because technical depth doesn’t matter - it’s because I finally acknowledge that my passion isn’t in the tools. It’s in the space between people and information.
2026 And Beyond: Walking Toward Something #
So what happens when you walk away from your professional identity? You find out what’s left.
2026 will be about walking toward what actually matters rather than running from what doesn’t.
What does “what actually matters” mean? Three things I’m now certain of:
First: If the work requires me to pretend that data theater is the same as insight, I don’t want it. I’d rather have fewer opportunities doing work that changes behavior than more opportunities building dashboards nobody acts on.
Second: If I can’t explain why a concept matters, I’m not ready to teach it. The blog stays. The research continues. I’m building the conceptual foundation I should have built years ago.
Third: If saying yes requires suppressing relief to feel obligation, that’s a no. The Knee-Deep decision taught me that. The Data Masterminds departure confirmed it. The running proved it works in other domains.
2025 was about discovering what I don’t want. 2026 is about having the discipline to act on it.
I don’t know yet where that work lives professionally. I’m deliberately not rushing into the next role because, for the first time in my career, I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to build dashboards that nobody acts on. I don’t want to implement platforms that exist to check boxes. I won’t do work that looks impressive and costs a lot of money but ultimately changes nothing.
What I do want: to keep writing these posts and discovering what I think by articulating it clearly. To keep mentoring people in finding their own voices. To keep speaking about concepts that matter rather than features that don’t. To keep flying, because nothing clarifies thinking like being alone at 3,000 feet.
Oh, and we’re getting the band back together - Knee-Deep in Tech will return, but not in the same weekly format. We’re figuring out what a podcast looks like when you do it because you want to, not because you have to.
2025 was tumultuous because it was honest. I stopped pretending that being busy meant doing work that mattered. I stopped confusing community service with personal passion. I stopped building someone else’s version of my career.
That feels like progress.
Happy New Year, and see you on the other side.
Join the Conversation #
What do you take away from 2025? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Reach out to me or comment on LinkedIn or BlueSky!
Photo by Designecologist: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-fireworks-display-2526105/