Year Of Focus
To set expectations for you my dear reader, this blog post was written for me, not for you. It's very long (quite long), but I'm still proud of it enough to post for the world to read.
The frigid days of December are often unbearable in New York City, but those same freezing temperatures combined with the slow down of work, life, and everyone's collective desire to rest up after a long year afford plenty of opportunity to sit and reflect. At the end of every year I start to think about what I'd like the next year to look like, and then I set a theme for the upcoming year to help me make those ideas become a reality.
Yearly Whats?
A yearly theme is explicitly not a resolution, but a guiding principle you can look to over the next year. A yearly theme shouldn't be too specific, otherwise you could just craft a resolution, and it shouldn't be so broad that anything could fall into that theme. I've borrowed the idea of yearly themes from the Cortex podcast, where they discuss at length what yearly themes are, and how they approach their own themes.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
— A quote commonly misattributed to Aristotle
What I like to do for my yearly theme is to look at a part of my life that's stopping me from being the person I want to be, and then work backwards to figure out what ideas, practices, and habits I can adopt to become that person.
New year new me, right? Wrong. I treat yearly themes as a way to build upon the work I did in the previous year, always striving to become more the person that I want myself to be. Continue Reading →