The flagship
The Planted Year
Twelve months. One field. Soil → Plant → Tend → Harvest. Not a conference high. Not a course you finish in a weekend and forget by Lent.
Cohort One begins January 2027. Enrollment opens October 2026. It is small on purpose.
Why a year
Because that is how long growing takes.
You have been to the conference. You felt it. You went home and by the third week the room had gone quiet and the calendar had reclaimed you. That is not a character problem. That is a duration problem.
Nothing that grows does it in a weekend. A season has phases, and each phase asks something different of you — which means a system that treats month two like month ten is not a season, it is a slogan.
So this is a year. One field, four phases, a standing set of rhythms, and people around you the entire way.
The season
Four phases.
Soil
Before anything goes in the ground you find out what you are planting into. The Soil Test from Mark 4's four soils, then Rocks & Thorns, then The Deed.
- The Soil Test
- Rocks & Thorns
- The Deed
Plant
One field only. You choose the seed and you commit it publicly — with a plan that already knows what will go wrong.
- The Almanac
- Five if–then plans
- The Stakes
- First Fruits
Tend
The open field. Weather comes. Opposition comes. The mid-season quit-point comes right on schedule, and you will have been told it was coming.
- The Pruning Loop
- Weathering
- Acreage
Harvest
You bring it in, you save seed for the next season, and you hand somebody else a seed. The year ends in a feast, not a report card.
- Bringing in the Sheaves
- Seed Saving
- The Harvest Festival
What holds it up
Six standing rhythms.
The phases change. These do not. They run every week of the year, and they are the reason the season survives the months when nothing visible is happening.
The Grove
Four people. Report, Reflect, Recommit, Rejoice.
The Vinedresser
One mentor who digs around it and puts on manure. Luke 13:8.
The Daily Tending
Small, logged, unglamorous. The whole scorecard lives here.
The Fallow
Rest is load-bearing, not a reward. Leviticus 25.
The Seed Vault
Everything you are not planting this season, kept — not lost.
The Field Walk
You walk the field with someone who will tell you the truth.
The scorecard
Tending Rate and Yield.
Two numbers. Tending Rate is what you did — logged, weekly, small. Yield is what came up. Only one of those is fully in your hands, and that is the one you are graded on.
You are graded on tending, never on weather.
The guardrails
- No shame mechanics. Nobody is ranked, and no one is made an example.
- One field per season. Everything else goes in the Seed Vault, kept — not lost.
- The fallow is load-bearing. Rest is scheduled, weekly and every fourth week. It is part of the yield, not a reward for it.
- Never alone. A Grove every week and a Vinedresser every month.
- The season ends in a feast. Not a report card. A Harvest Festival, in Jackson, with your name read out.
The double helix
Every mechanism gets a verse and a citation.
This year is not a devotional with statistics stapled on, and it is not a productivity system with a verse on top. Four of the load- bearing findings:
Hope is two things, not one
Snyder’s work separates agency — the will — from pathways — the way. A faithful person with a wrapped gift almost never lacks agency. They lack a route. This year is a pathways system, which is why it is twelve months and not one weekend.
If–then plans roughly double follow-through
Gollwitzer’s implementation intentions — “if X happens, then I will do Y” — carry an effect size near d = .65 across hundreds of studies. Every field in this year gets five of them, written before the season starts, because the plan has to already know what will go wrong.
Difficulty can mean importance
Oyserman found that whether hardship reads as “this isn’t for me” or “this matters” is an interpretation you can be taught. The mid-season quit-point is named and dated in advance so it arrives as weather, not verdict.
Six months is the threshold
In the transtheoretical model, maintenance begins around six months. A ninety-day program ends the week before the change would have stuck. A year clears it with room to spare.
Cohort One · January 2027
Join the waiting list.
Enrollment opens in October. The waiting list is how you hear first, and it is the same list that receives Next Level every month in the meantime — so you are not sitting still until then.
Not ready to commit a year? Take the Napkin Test first. It costs nothing and it will tell you whether this is even your season.