This post is about three weeks later than I anticipated, mostly because my life has been out of sorts since saying goodbye to my dog at the end of 2017. It is still January though so I feel I can still sneak in a New Year’s Resolution post.
That said, I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions.
Instead, I establish a theme for the year.
Theme-ing my years started more than a decade ago. At the time I was living at home with my parents, even though I had been out of college for a few years. I was still driving the car my parents bought me when I got my license. I was making decent money and saving a lot of that money because of my living situation. While life certainly wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good. I didn’t feel like a real adult and was worried I was going to turn into a sitcom character instead of fulfilling my potential. So that year I wrote myself a contract. Over the next 365 days, I would become independent. In that contract, I outlined ten things I needed to accomplish to feel independent – things like moving out my parents’ house and getting a new car…along with my own car insurance.
I revisited the contract each time I completed a task. By the end of the year, I had accomplished 8 of the 10 things I needed to in order to feel independent and adult-like.
Since then, every year has had an overarching theme that influences how I prioritize and structure my time. I’ve found having a theme for the year to be more beneficial than a list of resolutions because my theme transcends any single aspect of my life. Having a theme gives me a better way to think about what I want out of the year and how individual, seemingly siloed, pieces of my life influence each other.
Last year, my theme was Survival. On January 1st, 2017, I was unemployed with no meaningful prospects and all of the responsibilities (and ego) that carried over from my employed, salaried life. 2017 was all about finding ways to get it done:
- Finding ways to make enough money to cover my half of the expenses.
- Finding ways to deliver stellar work to my clients.
- Finding ways to productively fill the slow days.
- Finding a way to talk about myself without the help of my job title.
- Finding ways to create a social (and support) network in a new city.
2017 was about proving that when I only had myself to rely on I could make things happen and not fall into an abyss of despair and helplessness.
The good news is I survived. I would even go so far as to say there were some moments when I truly thrived, which led me to my 2018 theme: Growth.
I really like this theme because – like my other themes – it applies to multiple aspects of my life.
First, I have to grow my client base this year. My goal is to work with three new clients before 2019.
Second, I have to grow my network. Since I find networking to be wildly uncomfortable, my plan is to attend one networking event a week in hopes that they become routine and I become less awkward.
Third, I want to grow my awareness – and yes, this is different than networking. I want to write more, post more, share more. For years I’ve been generating content mostly for myself, but now I want to shift that and hopefully produce content that is interesting, useful, and valuable to other people.
Fourth, I want to grow my life. I miss my dog so much, but for thirteen years we planned our life around him. Because he was our responsibility, and we took that very seriously, we never did day trips or weekend trips to experience more of the world. Since we’ll definitely have another dog in our future, I want to make sure we make the most of this time when we’re responsibility-free.
Fifth, I want to grow my strength. Almost a year ago weightlifting became my exercise of choice. In that time I’ve seen significant improvements, but I have so much further to go so I’m committing to it in a more focused way.
So yeah, here’s to 2018. Looking forward to what lies ahead.