Start on the right foot

I’m excited to see where life will take me as I step further out of my comfort zone and embrace the nexus of things I love x things that serve me. Productive deployment of mental and emotional resources will be a major personal theme in 2020.

That’s an excerpt from Issue 1. Such wanton optimism. In fairness I do think I lived up to it. 2020 was an emotionally draining, unpredictable and dare I say it - unprecedented year. Despite technically having more time at home, it was also an extremely challenging time for me to maintain the focus and discipline needed to produce a weekly newsletter and podcast.✓

Don’t take the status quo for granted

Last year I proclaimed that I had fallen out of love with the idea of concrete goals and resolutions, and that it was sufficient to continually review more esoteric goals I set for myself in 2018.

The things I’m most proud of in the last few years were nowhere on January’s horizon. I know I’m in an accelerated growth and development phase of my life and keep that in mind with the tasks and opportunities I choose to undertake. I set soft personal goals (minimums rather than ideals) on current projects because hard targets can often feel like a ceiling on my aspiration. Instead, I’ve simply pinned my “Goals for 2018” note to the top of my notes app and I read over it every year as a reminder of the principles I want to be led by. They’re targets of character rather than achievement.

In retrospect this approach largely assumes a status quo of continual progress, and if there’s anything i’ve learnt from 2020, it’s not taking status quo for granted.

I previously wrote about productivity and the motivation myth, explaining the flaws of relying purely on motivation to accomplish tasks, but on a macro level I now see that I’d fallen into a similar trap with yearly planning. What gets measured gets managed, and this year I’ll be doubling down on that mantra.