The Janus Plan isn’t another New Year’s resolutions book. It’s a practical, inspiring guide that blends poetic metaphors with clear frameworks to help anyone create meaningful change.

Inspired by Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, The Janus Plan teaches you to look back with insight, look forward with intention, and build a year that reflects who you are becoming. Whether you’re a student starting out in life, a professional rethinking your daily rhythms, a retiree entering a new chapter, or simply someone who’s ready for a more grounded way to move through the year, this book meets you right where you are.

This is your threshold between the old and the new—an invitation to begin again.

The author, Jobert Abueva, recently took time to answer seven questions from Porchlight about his book—and others that have inspired him.

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Porchlight Book Company: Writing a book is no small undertaking. What compelled you to write this one?

Jobert E. Abueva: It started with New Year's resolutions consistently breaking.

People arrive at every new beginning with genuine conviction. In weeks the momentum is gone. I watched it happen with organizations and their goals. I watched it happen to me in a Hong Kong hotel room in 1997, burned out at the peak of a career that looked spectacular from the outside while I was exhausted and homesick and profoundly alone on the inside.

The answer I eventually arrived at is that the problem is not the people and their willpower. It is the sequence. We keep starting in the wrong place by charging forward without the honest examination that would make any forward movement real.

I wrote The Janus Plan because this practice worked for me and because every person I shared it with asked the same question: is this written down somewhere? Eventually I had to say yes.

PBC: What is one unanswered question you encountered as you wrote the book that you are most interested in answering now?

JEA: What would organizational culture look like if honest backward examination were built into every planning cycle as standard practice?

I kept bumping into this question while thinking about The Janus Plan's implications for teams and organizations. What happens to an organization that does this consistently, year after year, before every major commitment? And how would that change outcomes? I did not fully answer it. I suspect the answer looks less like goal setting and more like institutional wisdom.

This question has convinced me there is a next book.

PBC: If there is only one thing a reader takes away from reading this book, what would you hope it to be?

JEA: One question asked honestly before the next new beginning, whatever it may be: What did this year actually try to teach me?

Not what I accomplished. Not where I fell short. But what did the experience of living this specific chapter try to reveal about who I actually am and what I actually value?

Write the honest answer. Let what you find there be the foundation for what comes next.

If a reader does that, then takes the steps to act on it and sustain momentum, the book has done its work.

PBC: One of the great things about books is that they tend to lead readers to other books and additional discovery. What book[s] related to this topic would you recommend people read after (or perhaps even before) reading your book?

JEA: Before: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. The philosophical case for why the honest reckoning with time matters at all. Read it and you will understand why The Janus Plan begins where it does.

After: Essentialism by Greg McKeown. A rigorous exploration of what to leave behind. Pairs directly with Step 4, "Clean and Clear," of The Janus Plan.

PBC: What is your favorite book?

JEA: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

I return to it every time I am stuck not just in writing but in life. Lamott's central argument is that you do not write a book all at once. You write it bird by bird. One small, honest piece at a time. Without knowing where the whole thing is going. Without needing to.

The Janus Plan asks the same thing of its reader that Lamott asks of her writers: stop trying to see the whole picture before you have honestly looked at the piece directly in front of you. The honest backward examination, what did this specific chapter of my life actually try to teach me, is the bird in your hand. Everything else follows from that one honest look.

PBC: What are you reading now?

JEA: Fiction has always been where I do my deepest thinking about nonfiction. The novels I am drawn to consistently ask the same question The Janus Plan asks: what happens when the gap between the life a person is performing and the life they are actually living becomes impossible to sustain?

Steven Rowley's Take Me With You follows Jesse, whose husband Norman disappears into a beam of light after thirty years of marriage. Beneath the absurdist premise Rowley is really exploring what happens when two people stop honestly examining what their relationship has become. The disappearance is the most dramatic possible consequence of the honest examination that never happened.

Caro Claire Burke's Yesteryear follows Natalie, a successful tradwife influencer who has built an empire on a curated identity so thoroughly performed that she has lost access to the person beneath it. Burke asks the question The Janus Plan asks too: what would be left of you if your performance were stripped away?

PBC: Do you have any future projects in the works that we can look forward to?

JEA: Many recent conversations on The Janus Plan suggest it has legs to speak more directly to different audiences. For example, the organizational version of this work: a full framework for leadership teams entering a planning cycle who want to do the honest examination before any goal is declared. While the individual practice is in the book, the organizational practice deserves its own focused treatment. That is the next conversation I want to have.

About the Author

Jobert E. Abueva is a global marketing and philanthropy executive whose career spans Fortune 500 leadership, international brand building, and mission‑driven strategy. He has led marketing and communications across EMEA, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and North America. His leadership reflects the same cross‑cultural awareness and sense of purpose formed early in his global upbringing and deepened through a lifelong commitment to service. Jobert’s memoir, Boy Wander, earned multiple honors, including Lambda Literary’s  J. Michael Samuel Prize. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and several anthologies.