🦅 How to Win 2026

In this issue, you’ll find:

• How to win 2026 without setting a single goal

• News creators should know

• What will be the most impactful trend in social media in 2026?

How to Win 2026 Without Setting a Single Goal

I am not going to tell you to "set better goals" or "find your why." You have heard that advice a hundred times. It does not work.

The creators who consistently hit their targets do something different. They don't rely on motivation, accountability partners, or vision boards.

They build systems that make progress automatic.

Here are 3 I keep seeing among our fastest-growing Hypefury users. None of them are complicated. All of them actually work.

1) Your Phone Already Knows What Made You Happy This Year

Before you plan the future, you need to actually understand the past.

Most people skip this. They jump straight into "next year I will..." without processing what just happened. That is how you repeat the same mistakes.

Here is a dead-simple exercise: open your camera roll, scroll back to January 1st of this year, and go through your photos month by month.

Why this works

Your camera roll is an unfiltered record of your year. Not the highlight reel you post online. The actual moments you thought were worth capturing.

As you scroll, you will notice patterns:

• When were you happiest?

• Who were you with during your best moments?

• What were you doing when you felt most alive?

• What periods have zero photos (and why)?

This is not journaling. It takes 20 minutes. But it surfaces insights that spreadsheets and goal trackers never will.

2) Design Your Lifestyle Before Your Content Calendar

Most creators plan their year around output. How many posts, how many subscribers, how much revenue.

Then they wonder why they feel empty hitting those numbers.

Flip this. Start with the life you want, then build the business around it. Not the other way around.

Before you set a single content goal, answer this: what do you want your average Tuesday to look like in 12 months?

Not your highlight reel. Your regular day.

This sounds soft. But it is the most practical planning you can do. Because a goal without a lifestyle design is just a recipe for burnout.

Why this matters for creators

The creator game has no finish line. You can always post more, grow faster, launch another product. If you do not define what "enough" looks like, you will chase metrics forever.

I see this constantly: creators hit their revenue goal and immediately feel anxious about the next one. They 10x their audience and feel more stressed than when they started.

The ones who stay in the game for decades? They built a life they enjoy first. The content supports that life. Not the other way around.

3) The 30 Minutes That Keep You on Track

Here is why most annual plans fail: they get set once and never looked at again.

The creators who stay consistent for years do not have better discipline. They have a monthly habit of asking honest questions.

The 3 Questions Framework

Every month, schedule 30 minutes for a personal check-in. No spreadsheets. No KPIs. Just three questions:

1. What is working? Which systems, habits, or routines made this month feel smooth? Do more of that.

2. What felt off? Where did you feel drained, stuck, or misaligned? Something needs to change.

3. What do I want next month to feel like? Not what you want to achieve. How you want to experience it.

This is not about tracking progress toward a number. It is about noticing when your life drifts away from what you actually want.

No targets. No guilt. Just regular course correction.

The creators who win long-term are not the ones with the best plans. They are the ones who notice when something is off and fix it before it becomes a problem.

Mosseri Warns Creators About AI Content Flood

Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared his thoughts on the year ahead in a 20-slide carousel post, warning that AI tools are making "authenticity infinitely reproducible" and that AI-generated content will soon be indistinguishable from human-created work. He outlined Instagram's plans to combat this by labeling AI content, verifying authentic content, and providing more transparency about who's behind each account.

→ Find out more

Google Testing "Nano Banana 2 Flash"

Google is developing a new image generation AI called "Nano Banana 2 Flash," which will be part of the company's Gemini Flash lineup designed for speed and affordability. While it's expected to be faster and cheaper than the current top-tier Nano Banana Pro, it won't match its power for complex creative tasks like prototypes, diagrams, and infographics. The Nano Banana Pro remains Google's premium image model, leveraging stronger reasoning and real-world knowledge for high-accuracy visual outputs.

→ Find out more

2026: The Year AI Moves From Demo to Deployment

Ashu Garg of Foundation Capital grades his 2025 AI predictions and offers eight new predictions for 2026. Key themes include enterprise AI finally moving from pilots to production, a major AI security incident forcing the industry to mature, SaaS incumbents fighting back against AI-native startups, and Gemini potentially overtaking ChatGPT in consumer usage due to Google's distribution advantage. He also predicts at least one major AI lab (likely Anthropic or OpenAI) will go public, and that "Cursor-like" interfaces will become the default for knowledge work.

→ Find out more

Last poll: Which Platform Will Be the Best Place to Grow an Audience in 2026?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 𝕏 (28.57%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 LinkedIn (28.57%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ TikTok

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Instagram

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A new AI-native social media platform

That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss some more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury