Last Updated on December 27, 2025 by Alex Birkett
My friend Joe Martin is a smart guy.
I look up to him when it comes to designing a fulfilling life, and also when it comes to acoustic Kanye West covers.
One of the coolest things he does is name his year in advance. It sets the intent for your actions and is a quick heuristic for decision making.
For example, your year’s theme could be “connect,” and that could mean striving to build your professional network or to deepen the existing relationships in your life.
Last year, I chose the word “Faith,” which stood for a few different things, but together, reminded me of that feeling where you plug your nose and jump, even though there’s some uncertainty or risk (perceived or real). Like the feeling of dropping in on a skateboard.
It also reflected my desire to lean less on cold, rational logic, and a little bit more on magic. So, certainly, it invoked some sense of the religious connotation of “faith,” though not as explicitly defined as any specific doctrine.
How did it go? Very, very well. This “faith” thing seemed to have sunk through the first layer of conscious awareness into my operating system, and throughout the year, I feel like I’ve unconsciously embodied the principle in areas as diverse as business, romantic relationships (and heartbreak), and spirituality.
Each year I’ve been doing this, I feel like it has focused my direction in life, often reminded me of something I struggle with but is a present blocker towards what I tell myself I want.
For a few years, I’ve contemplated the idea of “presence.” It’s a constant theme in my newsletter, even making its way into my writing for Omniscient.
This is the year I put it into action.
What “Presence” Means to Me
I recently took a train from New York to Boston.
On it, I entered a deep focus state often referred to as “flow.”
It felt amazing. I got roughly a week’s worth of work done, and I read half a book. When I got to Boston, I felt like I had the mental equivalent to a good, hard workout. I felt relaxed, accomplished, happy.
It later dawned on me that I would enter these flow states much more frequently a decade ago. Something in my brain, routine, or environment has slowly, over time, made it more difficult or rare for me to get into deep focus.
After realizing this, I quickly picked off some low hanging fruit:
- I stopped sleeping with my phone in my bedroom (and instead bought an analog alarm clock).
- I stopped checking email before my morning dog walk.
- I switched to matcha in the afternoons.
- I canceled a few meetings.
While I’ve felt some positive movements, I know that there’s a deeper transformation that needs to occur, one where I embody the concept of presence, not only tactically optimize a few habits to be 10% more productive.
Presence, for me, is all encompassing and flows to various areas of life. It’s not just about better focus, though that’s an outcome I hope to achieve.
Presence also means my conscious awareness is largely centered in the moment, spatially and temporarily. This is especially important to me in my close personal relationships (family, friends, romantic), and it also applies to any sort of business meeting, virtual or in person.
Presence is oppositional to escapism. It necessitates confronting reality, not running, hiding, or fighting it. It’s a sense of poise and the willingness to sit in it.
Presence, while applicable everywhere, means mostly in person. I am tired of spending the bulk of my waking time in front of a screen. I live in New York City – it’s easy to do most things in person. I’ve begun working at an office three days a week, and I want to bring more structure to that as we hire more NYC based team members.
Presence is hosting, creating a center of gravity. Bringing friends together. The perennial pursuit of “community,” brought down to earth and made simple: do things together, be the person who drives.
Presence also relates to an ineffable “aura,” a level of authenticity, composure, dignity, and confidence.
That, too, extends into my abstract business objective – personal and brand presence. We’ve built the foundations, we’ve got the logos, the proof, and the team. Now it’s time to drive visibility, step on the stage, be unflinching in what we’re building. This means more publishing, more video, more speaking (podcasts, conferences, etc.)
I hope you’re beginning to see that I’ve painted a vision of presence that starts entirely internally (deep focus, removal of distractions, an emotional sobriety of sorts) that extends into personal behavior and routine (active engagement in the moment, building a social center of gravity and tribe, centering business operations as much as possible in person) and eventually to a place of interaction with a public (brand presence, personal presence for my thoughts, business, etc.).
Like I said, it’s all encompassing to me, and I can’t imagine a more important virtue to lean into as our world continues to slide into frictionless, optimized, alienated, digital oblivion. Presence is the foundation of freedom in some sense.