This summer I did hot yoga every single day for 35 straight days.
I went to Huntington Beach for a reset, and the daily practice was the centerpiece. All 35 days happened at Original Hot Yoga & Fitness HB, my favorite yoga studio anywhere. If you are ever in town, go. Best money I have ever spent.
This is the practice most people know as Bikram: the same 26 postures and 2 breathing exercises, in a very hot room, with no music, lights on and a mirror in front of you — every class. But nobody calls it Bikram anymore. The founder it was named after was accused of sexual assault in multiple lawsuits and left the country, and most studios dropped the name. At my studio it is simply Original Hot 60 or Original Hot 90. Some days I did sculpt instead: 45 minutes of weights in the heated room, then an expedited run through all 26 postures. Brutal, in the best way possible.
35 days later I am more flexible, stronger, my back feels better than it has in years and my mind is in a better place. But the real value was 5 lessons. I apply each to life and to the insights industry in 2026, in the age of AI.
| 35 Days | 105° Room | 26 Postures |
Lesson 1:
Knowing what is coming does not make it easier
The same 26 postures every single day. I could recite the sequence in my sleep. And day 35 was just as hard as day 3. I walked out soaking wet after every single class.
| IN LIFE: Preparation does not eliminate difficulty. A hard conversation, a career change, a challenging season will still be hard when you are standing in it. The people who thrive are not the ones with the best plan — they stopped expecting the hard to disappear and walked into the room anyway. |
| IN INSIGHTS: Everyone in our industry knows what is coming. AI is disrupting every step of the research process, from study design to data collection to storytelling. It is the most predictable disruption our profession has ever faced, and knowing that does not make it easier. Plenty of firms can describe the disruption perfectly and are doing nothing about it. Knowing the sequence is not the same as getting in the room. |
Lesson 2:
Improvement hides in the increments
On no single day did I feel different than the day before. Then, near the end, one of my teachers, Lavern, told me I was visibly improving — stronger in the balancing poses, my health “glowing.” The change was invisible in the increments and undeniable in the aggregate.
| IN LIFE: We live in the most instant era in history, yet everything that matters still compounds slowly: health, relationships, skills, character. We quit because we cannot see progress on any given day, when the progress was there the whole time. Compounding is boring right up until it is not, and then it is astonishing. |
| IN INSIGHTS: Everybody wants AI to be instant transformation. Buy the platform, run the pilot, done. The teams getting ahead are using AI every day: drafting guides, synthesizing open ends, building the story. On any given day, none of it looks like transformation. But 12 months in, they are operating in a way the pilot-and-wait crowd cannot catch. AI capability compounds exactly like flexibility. |
Lesson 3:
Do your version of the pose
Some postures my body simply cannot get into with proper form. My instructors never told me to skip them. They helped me adjust each one to the best version my body allows. I am not as flexible as some (all) of the people in class, but I am doing as much for my body as they are doing for theirs.
| IN LIFE: Comparison has never been cheaper. There will always be someone in the room, or on your feed, doing things you could never dream of. But you are not failing at someone else’s standard, you are succeeding at yours. The only honest comparison is against your own yesterday. |
| IN INSIGHTS: You do not need to be OpenAI or Google to win with AI. The frontier models are available to everyone at a reasonable price, so the advantage goes to whoever applies them best to their specific clients’ needs. A boutique firm that builds an AI-native version of itself, shaped around its niche, beats a giant running a generic playbook every time. Do not copy the biggest player’s pose. Do your version. |
Lesson 4:
Focus on the message, not the delivery
The studio owner and lead teacher, Donna, holds a high standard, and I took most of my classes with her. She corrected me in every class — for five weeks. Early on, part of me just wanted to hear I was doing fine. Then I realized what those corrections were: attention. She was watching closely enough to make me better and cared enough to say something. Once I focused on the message instead of the delivery, in a 105-degree room, I improved faster than I thought possible.
| IN LIFE: The people who correct you the most are often the ones investing the most in you — easy to forget when the algorithms are built to feed us agreement. Someone who tells you the truth about your blind spots is rare and valuable. Separate the content of feedback from your ego’s reaction to it and you get the growth most people talk about but never achieve. |
| IN INSIGHTS: AI arrives with terrible delivery: breathless hype on one side, doomsaying on the other. It is tempting to dismiss the whole thing because the packaging is ridiculous. That would be losing the message, and the message is real. AI is genuinely good at what insights professionals get paid for: synthesizing data, finding themes, telling the story, recommending action. The professionals who hear it will get better, like I did in that hot room. The ones who tune it out will get corrected by the market instead. |
Lesson 5:
When you think you cannot, breathe
The hardest days were sculpt days. After 45 minutes of weights in a heated room, I was spent and could not imagine getting through the standing series that came immediately after. Donna’s answer never changed: breathe through your nose, not your mouth. It got me through every time.
| IN LIFE: 2026 is an overwhelming time to be a person. Everything is changing at once and there is always a voice saying you are behind. When you are overwhelmed, you do not need a new strategy. You need one simple fundamental you can control to carry you through the next minute. Mine was breathing through my nose in a 105-degree room. Yours might be a walk, a routine, a call to a friend, a single next step. |
| IN INSIGHTS: Our industry is in its hardest stretch in decades, and for many of us it feels like the standing series after 45 minutes of weights. The answer is not panic or paralysis. It is returning to the fundamental that has always carried this profession: helping businesses truly understand their customers and make changes on behalf of those customers. AI changes how that work gets done. It does not change why it matters. |
The streak ends, the practice does not.
On my last day, Donna strongly encouraged me to keep practicing in Philadelphia, where I live. And that is the point. The 35 days were never the goal. They were proof that daily work compounds, and the start of a practice that does not end with the streak.
In yoga and in insights: do the work every day, do your version of it, hear the message, and when it gets hard, breathe.
Thank you, Original Hot Yoga & Fitness HB. See you next summer.
