One Decision I'm Making for 2026

NEXTletter is your practice for shaping what’s next. More than a newsletter, it’s a space to pause, reflect, and experiment. Every other Friday, you’ll get one question, two perspectives, and one experiment — to help you create the future you most want to live in.

Author

Frederik Pferdt
January 02, 2026

Prefer to listen 📻 > click here.

The beginning of a new year usually comes with a familiar checklist.

We set goals, promise change, and aim to be more focused, healthier, braver, or more disciplined than the year before. I have done this many times myself. And yet, the older I get, the clearer something else becomes.

If I want a future that actually feels good to live in, I cannot only design my days around achievement. I have to design them around people.

So this is how I am starting 2026.

With a simple, intentional decision.

Let me make friends.

Not more contacts.
Not more followers.
Not more networking opportunities disguised as conversations.

Friends.

People I can be honest with.
People I can laugh with.
People who make the future feel less abstract and more shared.

If this feels relevant to you, too, I want to invite you to try this with me.

ONE QUESTION

Who could I become friends with if I allowed myself to begin?

As I step into this year, I keep asking myself:

Who could I become friends with if I allowed myself to begin?

Not who should reach out to me.
Not who already fits perfectly into my life.

But who might be one genuine conversation away from becoming someone important.

The most meaningful gift isn’t something you unwrap. It’s the future you help someone create.

Use FUTUREREADY as your code and get 50% off our online course “Your 8 Days Future-Ready Mindstate Training” here, Future Creator!

You can also share the code once with someone you love or care about and who you think might need it. Just forward the link or the email.

TWO PERSPECTIVES

1️⃣  Friendship is not emotional decoration. It is biology.

For decades, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed people across their entire lives. Its conclusion is strikingly consistent: close relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term happiness, physical health, and longevity.

Not money.
Not success.
Not productivity.

Strong social bonds reduce stress, protect the heart, strengthen the immune system, and even slow cognitive decline. Chronic loneliness, by contrast, increases the risk of illness and early death at levels comparable to smoking or long-term stress.

Friendship is not a soft topic. It is foundational infrastructure for a good life.

If I want a future that actually feels good to live in, I cannot only design my days around achievement. I have to design them around people.

When I invest in relationships, I am not distracting myself from the future. I am actively strengthening my ability to live in it.

2️⃣ Why friendship feels harder as we grow older.

As children, friendships emerge naturally through proximity. Same school, same street, same afternoon rhythm.

As adults, proximity disappears and something else takes its place: protection.

We protect our time, our routines, and often our hearts. Life becomes genuinely busier, more fragmented, and more complex. The mental space we once had for spontaneous connection gets filled with responsibilities, decisions, and the quiet weight of everything we are managing.

Friendship now requires something that feels riskier than it used to.

Initiative.

Someone has to make the first move.
Someone has to ask the question.
Someone has to be open without knowing what will come back.

That moment can feel uncomfortable, even awkward. But I have learned that discomfort is often a sign that something alive is trying to begin.

Friendship does not happen to us as adults. It happens because someone chooses courage over comfort.

So instead of waiting for friendship to happen to me, I am choosing to practice creating it.

ONE EXPERIMENT

A Step by Step Practice for Making Friends

This is what I am experimenting with as the year begins. It is simple, human, and surprisingly powerful.

Step 1: Arrive with a real smile.
Not the polite one we use to move through life efficiently, but the kind that says, “I see you,” and then actually stays for a moment.

Step 2: Ask one honest question.
Choose something you genuinely want to know, and listen like the answer matters. Curiosity is one of the fastest ways to make someone feel safe.

Step 3: Offer one specific compliment.
Not a generic “you are great,” but something grounded in what you truly notice, such as their energy, the way they explained something, or how they treated someone else.

Step 4: Release the outcome.
This is the most important part. Do not turn the moment into a transaction. No expectation, no obligation, and no subtle attempt to secure a follow up. Just a clean act of generosity.

Then let the moment stand on its own.

Friendship does not begin with intensity or commitment. It begins with presence, and the courage to offer warmth without guarantees.

Life works. But something inside you wants more.

Not more to do. More alignment. More clarity. More you. My 1:1 Future Being Coaching is a space to reconnect with the future you actually want to live. Together, we uncover what’s quietly holding you back and turn insight into real steps you can take now, in your life as it is. This is for people who are ready to stop waiting for the right moment and start shaping what comes next from within. If that feels familiar, you’re invited.

New Podcast Episode

Best of 2025 · The Future Is HOW

As I was writing this NextLetter, I noticed something.

Many of the most meaningful moments from The Future Is HOW this year had one thing in common:
they circled back to relationships.

One of my guests, Robert Waldinger, leads the longest-running study on what makes a good life, conducted at Harvard University. Its conclusion is strikingly consistent: the strongest predictor of a long, healthy, and happy life is the quality of our close relationships.

Not how many people we know.
But how connected we feel.

That insight, along with many others, stayed with me.
So to begin this new year, I created a Best of 2025 episode of the podcast.

It’s not a retrospective.
It’s a reminder.

A reminder that the future we want to live longer in, feel healthier in, and feel more alive in, is built through how we relate to one another.

🎧 Listen to The Future Is HOW · Best of 2025 here.

The future isn’t something we wait for.
It’s something we practice. Together.

My closing thought

As you enter this year, you might be planning new projects, goals, or changes. I am doing that too.

But alongside all of that, I am choosing something quieter and just as important.

I am choosing people.

If this resonates, consider joining me. Not by trying harder, but by opening a little wider.

Let me make friends. 

It may be one of the most future-ready decisions we can make this year.

With love,
Frederik

The most meaningful gift isn’t something you unwrap. It’s the future you help someone create.

Use FUTUREREADY as your code and get 50% off our online course “Your 8 Days Future-Ready Mindstate Training” here, Future Creator!

You can also share the code once with someone you love or care about and who you think might need it. Just forward the link or the email.