Every time a new year comes around, people write down a handful of financial goals, and convince themselves that this year is going to be different. I’ve never understood why that belief sticks around when the evidence keeps saying otherwise. Folks make financial goals usually centered on how much they want to save, earn, or invest, and they treat those numbers like they are the plan itself, instead of looking at them as being the result of something deeper.
What usually gets ignored is the version of the person setting those goals. If you’re thinking about financial goals for 2026, you gotta be honest about how often people repeat this process without ever seeing a meaningful shift in themselves, and when I say people I mean YOU🙂not because they didn’t want it badly enough, but because they are trying to reach new goals using the same thinking, the same level of understanding, and the same habits that limited them the year before. The strategies change, the apps change, the motivation comes and goes, but the foundation stays the same, and so do the disappointing results.
What I’ve seen over and over again is people focusing on investment gains while completely overlooking the fact that THEY are the limiting factor in their own financial equation. They want better outcomes without better decision making, more money without more leverage, and advantages of ownership without ever learning how ownership works. That’s not a discipline issue, and it’s not about willpower. It’s a development issue that gets mislabeled or completely missed because it’s easier to blame consistency rather than to admit there are gaps in their understanding.
Most people respond to that gap by searching for something external to fix it. They look for a smarter investment, a safer strategy, or something that lets them feel like they’re moving forward without having to question how they actually think about money, risk, or opportunity. That’s how people end up rotating through goals year after year, staying busy while also staying in the same place.
What almost never gets questioned is whether the real constraint is the investment choice, the market, the aversion to risk, or if it’s the person evaluating those things with a limited perspective and understanding. Once people start thinking more about that, it changes how everything else looks.
That’s when investing in yourself stops sounding like generic advice and starts revealing itself as the thing that’s been missing the whole time. Not in a motivational sense, and not in a vague self-help way, but as a practical realization that if you don’t understand how money is really made, how businesses actually create value, or how ownership actually works, then every financial decision you make is at least partially a guess.
When people really invest in developing their understanding, their skills, and judgment as it relates to money and investing, the change doesn’t show up as a dramatic quick win. It shows up in fewer bad decisions, better timing, and a clearer sense of what type of financial opportunities they should be looking for and which they should be avoiding. They start seeing how wealthy people and businesses make money instead of just how stuff is sold to them, and risk stops feeling like something mystical or terrifying and starts feeling like something that can be evaluated with full context.
This also explains why so many people are comfortable risking money in familiar places that offer no real gain or ownership, while feeling uneasy about opportunities that require more learning and judgment. The issue isn’t courage. It’s conditioning. Most of us were taught how to consume long before we were taught how to own, so ownership feels foreign even though it’s where real financial power lives.
That gap in knowledge is getting more costly as work continues to change, roles get thinner, and stability tied to employment becomes less reliable. When your financial identity is built entirely around a paycheck, every economic or financial shift feels like a threat. When you’ve invested in skills, understanding, and access, those same shifts become easier to navigate, even if they’re still uncomfortable.
So if you’re setting financial goals for 2026, I'm not saying abandon the financial goals, but to recognize that they sit downstream from something more important. The real question is whether you’re willing to invest in yourself to become someone with better judgment, more leverage, and a better understanding of how money really works, because once that part changes, the money goals stop feeling like wishes and start feeling like easy math.
That’s the investment most people overlook, not because it’s unavailable, but because it requires more honesty than hype, and more patience than quick wins.
Cheers,
~Abdul
About Our Chairman
Hey Hey… I’m Abdul I’m the chaiman of Ajo Angels and Shujaa Capital and I’m on a mission to introduce angel investing to 25,000 black folks over the next five years. I’m doing this with the goal of narrowing the racial wealth gap as well as trying to close the billion dollar funding gap for black founders.