My best wishes to you for the New Year in 2026. This is the script of my first my first attempt at a YouTube podcast. I’ll slip in an a link to the video as well. There are no bells and whistles and you should be able to listen to the audio without the video and still get the whole effect. The podcast includes a glance back at 2025 and a few words about my goals for the coming year.
Happy New Year!
It’s the 1st of January 2026 as I write this, and will probably be the 2nd or 3rd by the time I manage to upload it and publish it on-line, so I’m behind the curve. My personal pole position, I like to think.
Introduction
Hello! My name is John Dudley. I’m a greybeard. I’m in the latter third of my life and embarking on a new journey – to become a published writer. In other words, I’m an “emerging author”, as I’ve recently learned to call myself.
Very nearly two years ago as I record this, I started to publish videos on YouTube, documenting my progress towards authorship. And now – the podcast. Ta-da!
Podcast logic
I was thinking yesterday how, at the beginning of 2025 I debated with myself about starting a podcast linked to my YouTube channel. I found all sorts of difficulties with that idea and never put it into practice. This year, as I was contemplating the failure – partial failure – of my 2025 ambitions to be a more communicative person and a better human being, I decided, Damn it, I’ll just start and see where things take me.
My logic is this: the videos on the YouTube channel take a great deal of time and effort. Preparing my New Year Goals for 2026, I calculated each video takes, on average, the better part of 10 days to make. I can’t be doing that as often as I should in order to post as regularly as I would like. Not if my primary objective is to write creatively. (The videos are supposed to be documenting my progress in becoming a published author, after all. They are not an end in themselves.) But I am disappointed in myself when I see the long gaps in my publishing schedule looking back over the year.
YouTube podcasts would let me bypass most of the video making hassle.
It’s on YouTube, so obviously it needs a visual element. And we’ll start with me talking to you here like this, face to camera. But because it’s a podcast, it’s supposed to be consumed without you needing to see anything to understand what is coming through your ears. I don’t need to add B-roll, or graphics, or gurning for the camera. (And I might, in the future, publish the audio alone through other more dedicated podcast channels.)
That ought to be less time consuming, wouldn’t you say?
Not off piste
I’m not planning to go far off piste with these podcasts. They will revolve around my writing interests, but I imagine other things will leak into them as we go along. How could they not? We live in the world we do, and I live in Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast. So the local and particular will mesh with the general and the universal, to twist Dr Johnson’s phrase. We’ll see what comes out.
I doubt I’m talking to a lot of people. Or will ever be. But I’m going to approach these podcasts in the belief that there are at least some people out there who may be interested. Even, perhaps ,entertained. And that you will find some pleasure in hearing my voice. I’m told it can be soothing – at worst, you might listen as you drop off to sleep.
New Year Goals (or Resolutions, if you prefer)
I’ve already mentioned my New Year Goals for 2026. I know, New Year Resolutions is the more established phrase, and they are resolutions in a way. But I find it more helpful to think of them as goals to aim for – perhaps to achieve – during the year. I’m making a video, the first of a series, about how I use a Bullet Journal to keep track of my efforts during the year to achieve my goals, so I don’t want to say much more about it here. I’ll just say that, apart from the traditional “lose weight” goal (spectacularly unsuccessful in 2025, but have a good feeling about the coming year). Apart from that, my goals largely revolve around writing.
I aim to write daily 365 days of the coming year and to average out at 1000 words written every day. To be sure, I didn’t score that goal last year, but I came tantalisingly close. I also aim to read – if I can – a book a week. I didn’t manage that in 2025 either, but I have done in past years, so it’s not an impossible achievement.
The social resolution
I have a social goal too – to be a nicer person and to be more social In Real Life. I’m not naturally outgoing, and I did very well under Covid. Unfortunately that year established comfortable habits I am only now trying to change.
I have not been as nice a person, as good a friend, or as loving a family member as I might have been. I have an ambition to change that. There’s enough poison out in the world without my adding to it.
What about you? What are your goals for 2026? There’s a comments field under the video of this podcast on YouTube, so you can drop me a line there if you like. Or you can contact me through one of my social networks. I’m on Instagram and Mastodon – or through my website at TheSupercargo.com. [Here!]
Valediction
Given the state of the world, I suppose the Happy New Year that I started with might ring a little hollow. But this is what we do, isn’t it? We humans. We enter each new year expressing a hope that it will be happy, or wishing happiness in the coming year to the people around us. There will be trials, we know, and troubles to come, this year as every year, but we start off with hope, because the alternative would be too bleak.
Besides, past experience tells us that, on balance, there will be periods of happiness for all of us, moments of joy that we will find in the months ahead, whatever they may otherwise bring. So that’s what I wish for you – and for myself – when I say…
Happy New Year!
