My 2026 Learning Plan

Obviously I am a little late posting…

Every January, I ask myself the same question: what do I need to learn this year to become the leader my team, my family, and my future self actually need? It is a deceptively simple question, but the honest answer always pushes me past my comfort zone. 2026 is no different.

Somewhere along the way, many of us were sold a story that education is something you complete. You finish school. You earn the degree. Or you collect the certification. Then you arrive. I have lived long enough, and led long enough, to know that story is false. The people I respect most, in business and well beyond it, are the ones who never stopped being students.

The shelf life of what you know is shrinking

The pace of change in our industry alone makes this point for me. Regulations shift. Trade policy moves. Technology rewrites workflows we thought were settled. A credential earned five years ago still matters, but it does not exempt anyone from the work of staying current. I have watched talented professionals quietly fall behind, not because they lacked intelligence, but because they stopped feeding their curiosity. The market does not wait for any of us to catch up.

That reality is what turned learning, for me, from a checkbox into a practice. Not something I do when I have time, but something I build the calendar around.

Growth has to be wider than the job description

Here is where I think a lot of professional development plans fall short. They focus only on the technical lane. Get sharper at the thing you already do. That matters, but it is not enough. The leaders I want to learn from read widely. They study history, psychology, design, negotiation, finance, communication. They borrow ideas from disciplines that have nothing to do with their day job, and those borrowed ideas are often what makes their thinking distinct.

So my 2026 plan deliberately splits into two tracks. Sharpening the craft, which for me means deeper customs expertise, operational leadership, and emerging technology. And broadening the person, which means topics that have no obvious tie to my title but absolutely shape how I show up in it.

Why I write the plan down

Intentions evaporate. Plans get followed. I am not naive about how easily a busy quarter can swallow a goal that lives only in my head, so I commit my learning plan to paper the same way I would commit a project plan at work. Books I will read. Skills I will build. Courses I will finish. Conversations I will go out of my way to have. When it is written, I can track it. When I can track it, I can defend the time for it.

Writing it down also forces honesty. It is easy to claim you are committed to growth. It is harder when the page asks, growth in what, by when, and how will you know?

Learning as leadership

There is a leadership dimension to this that I do not want to skip past. When the people I lead see me reading, asking questions, taking notes in meetings, signing up for the course, admitting what I do not yet know, it gives them permission to do the same. Curiosity is contagious. So is its absence. A team led by someone who has stopped growing tends to stop growing too.

I would rather be the manager whose people watched him keep learning, especially in the years when he did not have to.

What 2026 is really about

If I had to summarize the spirit of this year’s plan in a sentence, it would be this. I am not learning to add another line to a resume. I am learning because the world I want to lead in, and the person I want to be while leading in it, both demand it. The degree, the credential, the title, those are mile markers. They are not the road.

Below is what I am committing to this year. Some of it will stretch me. Some of it will surprise me. All of it is on the calendar. If any of it sparks something for you, take it, adapt it, and build your own.