2025 Report

What a year 2025 has been! If you’ve been following these annual reports, you know I teased “The Project” in my 2024 report. Well, the time has come to reveal what that was all about. 2025 was, without exaggeration, a chapter break in my life story. Let’s dive in.

The Project Revealed

Remember when I wrote about going out to claim what you deserve rather than waiting for life to hand it to you? That mindset shift led to the biggest change I’ve made in decades: moving from Turkey to the United States with my family. We settled in the Seattle Area, Washington, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

But that’s not all. This move also meant leaving Microsoft after nearly 4 years and joining AWS. For someone who has been in the Azure ecosystem since PDC 2008, this was seismic. And that’s precisely why I love it. The move has shaken every stone in my head, destroyed all the comfortable patterns I’d built up, and given me fresh perspective on technology, organizational culture, and leadership. AWS is a completely different beast than Microsoft, different values, different strengths, different challenges. If I were to write a book about my life, 2025 would undoubtedly be the start of a new chapter.

I’m still finding my footing in this new ecosystem. I’m on the Cloud Intelligence team, providing strategic intelligence and differentiation support for account teams for AI/ML/GenAI workloads globally. It’s humbling to be a beginner again after years of expertise in a different stack. But that discomfort? That’s where growth lives.

Health: The Strategic Pivot

I ran the San Francisco Marathon this year and hit a personal record: 4 hours and 18 minutes. I was ecstatic, until I realized I couldn’t climb stairs for four days afterward. Turns out I’d been running on an injury I didn’t even feel during the race. Classic.

The marathon training was rewarding, but it revealed something important: I’d lost significant muscle mass in the process. For someone at my stage of life, that’s strategically problematic. Muscle is the longevity organ, and cardio-heavy training was working against that priority.

So I made a decision. I pivoted hard into weight training for the last quarter of the year and put cardio on the back burner. The results have been encouraging: 262 lbs (119 kg) one-rep max on deadlift, 286 lbs (130 kg) on squat. I had the Seattle Marathon on my calendar for the end of the year, but I chose not to run it. Marathons are fun, but they’re not what my body needs right now. Will I run another marathon someday? Probably. But not in 2026.

On the weight front, I’ve landed exactly where I wanted to be. I’m hovering around 90 kg (198 lbs) and have been stable for months. My end-of-year DEXA scan showed 17% body fat. I’m genuinely happy with these numbers.

Growth: The Academic Milestone

I finished my PhD. Let that sink in for a moment, it still hasn’t fully sunk in for me. My dissertation on leadership is complete, defended, and done. For the first time in my life, I attended my own commencement ceremony. I have multiple master’s degrees and had never bothered with graduation ceremonies before. But this one felt different. It felt like a milestone worth marking, and I wanted to set an example for my son about what dedication and perseverance look like.

Don’t tell my family, but I don’t see this as the end of my academic journey. There’s more to come.

Speaking of which, remember that Master’s in Engineering Management I started at CU Boulder while doing my PhD? I’m now one course away from completion. I’m confident it will be wrapped up by the end of March 2026. The degree delivered exactly what I hoped for: it filled the gaps in my financial acumen for engineering organizations. The broader engineering perspective, not just software engineering, has been invaluable for project management and financial planning.

Coaching

My coaching practice continues to thrive. The challenge now isn’t growing it, it’s that I simply don’t have more time to give. Between the new job, the move, and everything else, my calendar is full. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. Helping people grow is what energizes me. Watching clients discover their path and move forward with greater confidence remains one of the most fulfilling parts of my life.

Giving Back

I spoke at 30 events this year, which is a notable decrease from the 60 sessions I did in 2024. The shift makes sense: with my move to the US and my primary audience remaining in Turkey, most of my speaking has transitioned to online formats. I expect this trend to continue in 2026. The geographic distance changes the dynamics, but the impact and connection remain.

Writing

I made meaningful progress on “Uykudan Önce Bir Doz” (A Dose Before Sleep), my Turkish self-help book. I wrote 5 new chapters during the end-of-year holidays. This book has been a decade-long project with no deadline, just a bucket I fill with insights as I live life and learn. I had accumulated many notes over the years and finally materialized some of them into proper chapters. The book is available on Leanpub if you’re curious and read Turkish. An English version will come once the book is complete. For now, it remains a Turkish project, true to how it started ten years ago.

Looking Ahead to 2026

You know I don’t do static annual plans, and I certainly don’t announce them. But I’ll share my general direction.

On the health front, the focus will be muscle building and improving my blood markers. I’ve been monitoring my bloodwork quarterly for a while now, that deserves its own blog post someday.

On the professional front, I need to shine at AWS. I’m new to the company and ecosystem, and I want to build proficiency and deliver real impact. No rigid plans, but expect a lot of skilling and probably a few experiments.

For coaching, I want to explore more scalable approaches, perhaps group coaching or another format. The goal is experimentation and learning from those experiments.

But here’s the twist, the thematic focus for 2026: I want to produce more than I ingest. Over the past years, I’ve invested heavily in learning, absorbing, and building knowledge. In 2026, I want the balance to shift. More creation. More output. More shipping. I’ll still dedicate significant time to skilling, both vertically and horizontally, but the percentage of energy going toward production should exceed what goes toward ingestion.

How exactly will that manifest? We’ll find out in my 2026 report.

Here’s to a year of building, creating, and making things happen!