Year's End, Reading, Reflecting

A Radical Alternative to College

Monday, December 22nd, 2025

Writing to you from Uruguay

This post is accounting for the last two weeks.

It’s hard to believe how fast these past two weeks have gone by…and even harder to believe that less than two weeks from now I’ll be writing to you from Japan — 11,610 miles away.

Of course, there’s lots of things to look forward to: Starting the Fighter Cycle, training muay thai in Thailand, starting on a clean slate in the new year, going to Asia for the first time…the list goes on.

To be frank, there hasn’t been very much going on and very little preparation needs to be done from here. Thanks to my fiancée the flights/hotels for Japan are booked, so we are all set to spend a good 3 weeks in Japan. The second trip to Thailand, which I’ll be taking alone, is a bit trickier to prepare for. Not in the sense of logistics, but in physical preparation.

Here’s what I mean:

Back in July of this year I was in Paraguay (the worst country I’ve ever been to) and managed to find a good kickboxing gym just 7 minutes from where we were staying. By then I had only had two or three kickboxing lessons in the past, but wanted to take advantage of all the free time by improving my striking skills.

One hour a day, five days a week.

That’s how much we trained. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to wear you out. The training was great though — I saw huge improvements in my punches and overall movement. Terrible hooks I was throwing was fixed and my jabs got a little faster.

Anyway, those two weeks of training showed me that I really need to be prepared for Thailand.

The training at the Muay Thai camp in Chiang Mai consists of two separate training sessions: one 2-hour session in the morning and another 2-hour session in the afternoon…6 days a week. Now that’s tough.

I am stronger than I was back in July, but I’m also carrying more fat and I have lower stamina. The past couple weeks I’ve been training on the punching bag we have here to try to gain back some of that endurance and get a little leaner. The goal is to show up and be able to preform as best as I can — being in better shape will help. And, since I’m only going to be there for about 2 months, I want to make as much progress as possible within that timeframe.

We shall see.

Finishing the Entrepreneur Cycle

The benchmarks of success have been hit: I generated an organic lead through Facebook marketing that led to a sale, completed the required academics, and have nearly finished all of the required reading for the Cycle.

These past two weeks I finished Influence by Robert Cialdini and The Million-Dollar, One Person-Business by Elaine Pofeldt. Both were good books, and now all I have to finish is Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. After that, the Cycle is officially completed and over. Crazy how fast it’s gone by.

Oh and one other note on the Cycle…

I mentioned a couple weeks back that I would run one last ad to promote the multispectral mapping services for the agricultural drone business. Well, I created the ad, sent it out to Facebook, and could see pretty early on that there was a lack of interest in the ad. Still unclear whether it was a problem with the ad or a general disinterest in that specific service. Either way, it didn’t seem like it was worth running, so I cut it off quickly.

Making Things a Bit More Pretty

The lighting doesn’t really do it justice, but we finished painting the entire interior of the little house we stay in on the ranch. It’s a brick house that an old employee used to stay in with his family. They didn’t take great care of it during the decade they were employed on this ranch, which was obvious when I first decided to move in.

The walls were painted a strange beige color, mold was growing in some places, and in some areas paint was falling off completely — leaving exposed brick to view.

Just about every inch of this place was dirty.

Honestly, it was a reflection of that old employee and his family — lazy, scheming, and unimpressive. People’s homes (and their physical appearance) do tend to take on the character of the person themself. It’s a fact that isn’t surprising, but always interesting to see in action.

Anyway, slowly but surely we’ve been trying to improve this place for a while. Lots of cleaning, rearranging, decorating, and now painting has created an entirely different atmosphere around here.

Painting isn’t a wildly impressive skill, but it’s one of the many small things that makes a place much better. Overall, the real skills is being able to leave something much better than you found it — to make something beautiful out of nothing.

We aren’t there yet, but it’s coming along.

Good People Are Game Changers

If you’ve been following along for a while you probably know that since August of 2023 (when I first started what’s now known as The Preparation) I’ve been trying to improve my chess skills on and off.

Well, I was getting pretty frustrated after a huge losing streak which nearly made we put off playing chess again for a long time. The problem was obviously me…and that only made me more frustrated. You see, when you truly want to improve in chess any prolonged losing streak seems like a direct reflection of your IQ.

Usually that’s not the issue, but you still feel like an idiot either way.

That’s beside the point…

A good friend of mine who is much smarter, much wiser, much older, and much better than myself wanted to help me out. “I know I can help”, he said to me.

Then, after just one hour of examining one of my past chess games and analyzing it, my desire to play chess and improve was back. My friend had showed me exactly what I was doing wrong, explained tactical errors, and left we with plenty of words of encouragement. Chess is exciting again.

That’s what good people can do.

Reflecting

I know where I went wrong this past year. I’m very aware of my own mistakes.

Of course, a lot of good came out of this past year — sailing in the Falklands, learning to fly a plane, working on a geophysics crew, training BJJ, publishing The Preparation, and starting a business to name a few things…

But, the thing the I remember and reflect on most this year is my major mistake of forgetting what matters most and why.

The sailing course at the beginning of the year was amazing for a number of reasons and it was a big win early on in the year. But, it was quickly followed up with a feeling of emptiness when I headed back to the states to complete flight school and get all of my certifications to work on wildfires again. I still got a decent amount done, but (and I see this clearly in retrospect) there was a building feeling of emptiness and lack of understanding in the background. I could feel it, but couldn’t tell what it was at the time.

After being being offered a unique job working on a geophysics crew in the middle of nowhere in Nevada it got a whole lot worse. It was crappy work around crappy and incompetent people (although the geologists, head geophysicist, and owner of the company are all fantastic guys…it was the crew they put together that sucked).

By then, after hours working in the hot sun and dealing with tons of BS, I felt so detached from my original objectives and drive with The Preparation. That was the tipping point, that was when I wanted to be done with things. So I left.

Yet, of course, that only made it worse in the following months because I regretted making that decision to leave. I lost out on doing a lot of what I planned to do.

It was a major personal failure. Not something I ever want to replicate.

I’m not going to go into the details here, but I now know what caused all of it. I know how and why it happened, and I plan on making sure that it doesn’t come close to that in the future. I’ll go into more depth about this topic soon because I want to make sure that you never have to face the same problem, but for now I’ll leave it here.

This next year will be a great one…the best one thus far. I can feel it.

Stay tuned, we’ll talk soon…

-Maxim Benjamin Smith