It is New Year's Eve. The year turns tonight.
I do not do resolutions. I have written about this before — the research on New Year's resolutions is unambiguous: most are abandoned by February, and the annual ritual of self-improvement promises has become a way of performing the intention to change without actually changing.
What I do instead, on this day, is think about what matters. Not what I achieved or failed to achieve. What actually matters.
One Life
My motto is simple: Life is short. One shot.
I adopted it after my father died in July 2012. He was 59. Aortic aneurysm. He had been planning to write more, to travel more, to finish things he had started. He ran out of time before he ran out of plans.
I was in Texas when I got the call. I flew to Freiburg for the funeral. My brothers and I carried the coffin. It was heavy in every sense of that word.
I came back to Texas a different man. Not immediately — grief is not immediate. But over the following months, I understood something that I had known intellectually but had not yet fully inhabited: the time you have is the time you have. It does not wait for you to be ready.
What Actually Changed
After my father died, I rebuilt. The marriage had ended. The Texas chapter was closing. I returned to London with my children and I built something new.
STM Corporate Group. Perspektive Ausland, which became the most listened-to German-language emigration platform, with 144,000 subscribers. A second life, in many ways — different but rooted in everything that came before.
The ranch in Texas broke me. It also made me. I do not recommend the path. But I would not trade what I learned from it.
What I Want for My Readers in 2026
I write for people who have built something — a business, a career, a portfolio — and who are beginning to understand that the system they built it inside is not reliably on their side.
I want for them what I have tried to build for myself: genuine freedom. Not the freedom to do whatever you want — that is not freedom, that is chaos. But the freedom that comes from having built structures that are not entirely dependent on any single government's goodwill, from having options in a world where options matter, from having thought carefully about what you are protecting and why.
That freedom requires planning. It requires professional advice. It requires the willingness to act before the crisis, not after it.
Most people will not do it. The inertia is too great. The comfort of the familiar is too strong. And then one day the familiar changes, and they did not build the structure that would have absorbed the change.
I want my readers to be the ones who acted.
A Blessing
Pope Leo XIV ended his final audience of 2025 with words I found genuinely moving. He quoted St Leo the Great's invitation — to the saint, to the sinner, to the pagan — to rejoice in Christ's birth. And he quoted St Paul VI: the core message of the Jubilee, of the whole Christian life, can be summed up in one word: love.
The tax code does not care about love. The German exit regulations are indifferent to it.
But it is the thing that makes the rest of it worth doing. The reason I have built what I have built is not the balance sheet. It is the people I am building it for.
Ten children. One life. One shot.
Make 2026 count.
Work with Sebastian
The first week of January fills up fast. If you want to start the year with a serious conversation about your freedom, your structures, and your family's future, book now before the calendar is gone. Book a consultation.