Welcome to Issue 60 of A Good Reputation, a newsletter about how to tell a better story to build better brands. (Did someone send you? Subscribe here.) (Miss past issues? Read those here.)

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Hello Reader,

I rang in the New Year alongside someone trying to convince me that everything—and I mean everything—is about to drastically change.

Her name is Narayana, and she’s the wife of an old friend, Alex.

In addition to being Alex’s wife, she’s also a popular professional astrologist. (Yes, it is an actual job.) She has published a couple of books and built a thriving business writing for major magazines, reading people’s star charts, and making art.

Alex, meanwhile, is a literal rocket scientist who builds and sends spacecraft into the sky.

I’ve always been a little confused by this pairing. But as Alex lovingly put it in his laid-back California way, “We both just exist up in the stars, you know?”

While I’m unclear on what Alex believes, what Narayana tried to convince me of—along with a handful of other friends we had over for dinner on New Year’s Eve—is what others who also study the cosmos are saying:

2026 is officially the beginning of the beginning of a new era.

This is the year that you and everyone in your life either moves into a new house, a new job, a new phase of business, a new relationship, a new perspective, or a new chapter of life that will anchor and define your experience for several years to come.

Between bites of lamb and sips of fancy champagne, I leaned in as Nariana attempted to explain all of this in layman's terms to us non-astrologers.

"Hasn't everything already changed?" I asked her.

"No," she responded. "Everything has been in transition. Now it changes."

Later, I went to the Google to try and find out more.

Apparently, we're entering a new era marked by radical independence from institutions, a new geopolitical order, and a reconfiguring of the way things have always been done and seen—from our values and cultural norms to our most strongly held beliefs about ourselves and society.

While I still don’t understand what it means by “when Neptune enters Aries,” what stood out to me was something about how the planets are arranging themselves. It’s a cosmic alignment that we haven’t seen since the first year of the American Civil War in 1861. (Alex, the rocket scientist, confirmed.)

Since I'm not great at remembering and recalling whole periods of history and how they impacted humanity, I had to look that up, too.

Turns out, that historic event served as the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Along with ushering in the end of global slavery and rapid industrialization, that era saw the rise of new ideologies like Social Darwinism and Marxism that reshaped how people understood freedom, identity, and power.

I spent the next day taking all of this in, trying to figure out what I want to make of it.

Then, as if on cue, I hear the news of President Trump kidnapping the leader of Venezuela and his plans to take over the country to control its oil. After that, it's the story of federal agents shooting an American citizen that sparks protests over who's telling (or trying to control) the truth.

Whatever you choose to believe or not about the signals in the stars, the ones happening on earth are pretty hard to ignore.

As individuals and a collective, we’ve already been forced to change. Every day, it seems, we have to come up with new ways of deciding what to believe, who to listen to, what to trust, and what any of it means.

Our instincts right now are to question everything. And few things seem to have clear answers.

And while we used to have so many communities— from churches and neighborhood groups to our workplaces—to navigate change with, now it feels like we have to figure it out all on our own.

There's a reason everything feels chaotic right now. It is. Periods of transition always are.

I'm tempted to believe that this really is the beginning of a new beginning and that the world, as we currently understand it, is ending. Because on a lot of levels, I'm ready to be done with the way things have been done. And I'm open to embracing the possibilities of a new way of operating.

While we can predict some of it, I can't bring myself to believe that any of it is predetermined.

Every single one of us has an active hand in shaping culture and what comes next—either through what we're putting out in the world or what we're fueling with our attention.

So if you, like me, are building brands, telling stories, and trying to earn trust in a changing world, this moment could be a defining one with a brand new collection of narratives that we get to shape.

A Good Story

I'll give you an example of what I'm trying to unpack here.

On Sunday, a perfect storm created by the moon’s proximity to the Earth, a rising tide, and nonstop winter rains released a monsoon of unprecedented flooding in several cities in and around San Francisco, forcing evacuations of dozens of families that live on a lagoon—including my very own kids who were supposed to be at their dad’s house through the weekend.

As drone footage of the flooding circulated on the internet and group chats, so did this image of a spotted leopard shark swimming around the high school parking lot. Supposedly, it got washed in from the bay.

Yes, our very own Sharknado.

Some people immediately questioned whether the image was generated by AI, while others jumped in to defend the plausibility of a shark in the neighborhood.

Some people obsessively dug to find the truth and then took to public forums on Facebook and Reddit to set the record straight.

Others didn’t bother to fact-check or care—they just loved the story.

And that's how it spread. Either because it made for fun dinner conversation or justified their worldview that everything is coming to an end.

This is the moment we’re all navigating. A moment where we have to trust our instincts more than our eyes. Where the burden of finding the truth is on the individual.

Ultimately, where we get our information, how we shape our belief system, and how we build our worldview come down to who we choose to align with and trust.

So, how do we get anyone to trust us?

A Good Paradox

One of the biggest shifts I've been paying attention to in this online information world is around authority. Both because I'm trying to build it and help others do the same.

Here's what's changed:

For most of modern history, the answer to the question about who or what to trust was either handed down to us from top-down sources of authority or through titles that carried weight.

For the most part, institutions like the church, legacy media, and the government told us what mattered. At one point, Walter Cronkite was our single source of truth. And credentials like “doctor” didn’t require much more explanation or spark skepticism.

At the same time, we had these less evident sources of truth, trust, and authority in the form of narratives we collectively accepted and believed.

Stories like the American Dream, scaling the corporate ladder, effort in the form of hard work equals reward, and the nuclear family, told us how to live a good life, and helped us figure out where meaning lives. While there have always been many ways to be, there was a shared understanding (for the most part) of the clear paths to fulfillment and a successful life.

But somewhere along the way—no doubt accelerated by the internet and the emergence of AI—those foundational stories started to crack. Authority stopped flowing cleanly from the top down, and meaning stopped being shared by default through these narratives.

You might still trust NPR as an unbiased source of news, but your neighbor only believes that GenZ journalist on TikTok.

Once you start looking, you see these cracks and shifts (and all the new questions it all brings up) everywhere.

What it looks like is digital nomads wandering the world without clear moorings, untethered from traditional markers of success. Or journalists leaving legacy media giants to build trust directly with audiences on owned channels. Or professionals leaving “prestige” jobs for portfolio careers in search of personal freedom and flexibility. Or parents telling their kids that going to college isn't a necessary—or even smart—decision anymore.

In short, people are no longer accepting inherited paths as default—they’re interrogating them. And they're looking to other people who want the same things, believe the same things, or value the same things to give them guidance.

As individuals, this is where I see the light in this transformation.

It means we have more freedom than ever to define success on our own terms, choose our values consciously, and build lives that reflect who we actually are rather than who we were told to be by society or our parents.

As a business owner, I see the shift as an opportunity to build my business and help others do the same by consistently standing out with evidence-backed information and a set of clearly articulated core beliefs that attract people who are truly aligned with you.

I see the effort we have to make to form actual relationships with our audiences, customers, and clients—not just shove them in a faceless funnel.

I see the intimate communities that are springing up all over to create spaces for shared understanding and growth.

Now, as a collective, I see the real downside of this shift. Because without trusted sources of truth—like news organizations with integrity and skilled fact-checkers—we can all make anything fit our made-up narratives and become even more divisive.

But, again, all we can do there is share our truth to help people understand our perspective. We can choose what we give our attention to. And we can be open to hearing the real lived experiences and perspectives of others in an effort to understand.

A Good Takeaway

Yesterday, a member of my storytelling cohort told me this:

"I've already lost most of my filter, and this year might see me fully embrace letting go. Like I'm terrified of how much I just do not care about saying whatever I think is right."

I encouraged her to lean in. That fiery and fierce conviction is what the moment is calling for. People will either agree and align with her or they won't.

But as long as it's rooted in her lived experience and perspective, they can't question it.

Moreover, I think she's tapping into a collective breaking point that we're all feeling about the way things have been going. Many of us are ready to make a change that feels both empowering and scary.

But I don't think we need to be scared. Whether we arrived here by way of the stars or the screens, the result is the same.

We’ve entered an era where certainty comes from individuals more than institutions. Where trust is no longer inherited because of a fancy title, but earned through consistency and shared values.

For brands, creators, businesses, and thought leaders, this means getting clear on your core beliefs and truths so that you can articulate those things to the people who are looking for guides.

The stories you tell about yourself and your work aren’t just expressions of identity anymore. They’re important signals. And you can use those signals to build communities of people who are aligned on what's best for our collective future.

If this really is the beginning of a new beginning, let's write a better, more original story.

A Few Good Resources

1. Want to talk about this stuff in real life alongside other entrepreneurs? We'll explore existential questions AND workshop strategic, practical, and tactical ways to grow our businesses at the New Narratives Retreat in April. Only 7 seats left.
2. My next short-form storytelling cohort kicks off Feb. 4th. Joining this month gives you access to the ongoing membership community.
3. If LinkedIn is your focus, my friend Stacy has open enrollment for her Content Circle community.

Hope you have a good one,
Renee