If a browsing reader opened The Janus Plan at random, I would hope they landed on the first pages of Step One: Ponder the Past. Perhaps because it is the most honest. It begins with a question most of us have never been directly asked: what did this year actually try to teach you?
That question lands differently from any goal-setting prompt I have ever encountered. It assumes the year has been a teacher. It assumes the student has been, to some degree, inattentive. And it asks for honest engagement rather than performance of progress.
The pages that follow give the reader specific tools for answering that question: the artifacts they can gather from the year behind them, the highs and lows worth sitting with, the insights that only emerge when you stop moving long enough to look.
If I had to choose a single passage to hand someone, it would be this one, from the introduction:
"Why Janus? Because beginnings deserve reverence. Because endings deserve reflection. And because your life, like Janus's temple, is built with two doors: one for looking back and one for stepping forward."
That is the book in three sentences. Every page that follows is an attempt to make that practice real rather than rhetorical.
I would also hope a browsing reader found Step Five: Revel in Ritual. The argument is that ritual is not soft or ceremonial but neurologically necessary. That marking a threshold with deliberate ceremony signals to the brain and body that something has genuinely changed. And there is such a wide array of rituals worldwide. Some superstitious. Some serious. Some even wacky.
The book also includes what I call Stitch Notes throughout or brief insights and pro tips stitched gently alongside the main text, like the subtle threads that hold a tapestry together. They add texture and playfulness without interrupting the flow. I wanted the book to have lightness alongside its depth. Doing something good for yourself should not be a burden. My aim is for readers to smile, even laugh, along the way.
My deepest wish for this book is that it becomes a shared practice rather than a private one.
The Janus Plan works for individuals. But it works better when two people do it together -- a couple sitting down in December to ask each other what the year was trying to teach them before they commit to the year ahead. Or a family gathering before the school year begins to honestly name what each person needs from the months to come. Or a leadership team arriving at their annual planning retreat having each done the honest backward examination individually, so that the collective conversation is grounded in something real rather than something performed.
The book was written with that shared use in mind. Every step includes prompts designed for group reflection as well as solitary practice. Every exercise can be adapted for a team of two or a team of two hundred.
My professional hope is that The Janus Plan becomes a tool for organizational planning: a framework that gives teams a shared language for the honest conversation that most planning retreats skip. The meta-message I keep returning to is that most organizational problems are downstream consequences of the honest conversation that nobody had. The Janus Plan creates the conditions for that conversation.
My personal hope is simpler. I hope readers finish the book and feel, for the first time or the hundredth time, that they have permission to begin again. Not because the calendar says January or because a new quarter has started or a new year has been declared somewhere on earth. But because they have done the honest work of completing what came before and that honesty has given them a foundation solid enough to build something meaningful on.
I have practiced and refined this plan for nearly three decades. What began as a personal framework for reflection and renewal after I had lost my way has become the foundation for a life of purpose, vitality, and creative fulfillment. The plan helped me leave a job that was depleting me and to start writing, publish in The New York Times and elsewhere, complete a memoir, serve on boards I believe in, build a body I am proud of, and open my heart to a new relationship rooted in mutual respect and joy.
These outcomes did not happen overnight. They were cultivated, year by year, through the steady rhythm of the Janus Plan. Any time of year. Any threshold. On purpose.
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