If December is the time to be jolly, now is the time to be earnest. With the start of the New Year comes the opportunity to set goals and plan strategies that turn aspirations into reality. If you’re ready to get serious, join me in resolving to make this year better than the last. With that in mind, here are a few of my thoughts that might stimulate a few of yours.
Let go of that baggage you dragged through 2013. If it was negative, mean-spirited, blaming, and excuse making, don’t give it the time or energy it is clamoring for. Instead, kick it to the curb. You need the heart and head space to accommodate positive, well-meaning, responsibility taking behavior.
Get back into the world. If you’ve become so enamored with your techie toys that you’ve forgotten the importance of people, the resonance of relationships, the perspective taking that good friends and family can provide, rediscover those who’ve been waiting for you to reconnect.
If you have been passively watching, choose to actively engage. Go to a lecture. Attend a class. Discuss big ideas with people whose minds aren’t small, whose views aren’t narrow, and who ask what’s possible and invite others to do the same. Value tactics as well as strategy. Each needs the other to achieve a worthwhile end.
Volunteer your time for good purpose. Do good deeds. Treat everyone with respect, listen to learn, and experience what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. Experience what it’s like to have no shoes. And then, if you can, where and when you can, learn how to make shoes.
Be more patient with those who know less than you about what you know so well. Recognize, with humility, that others know more than you about what you know so little and do least well.
Try harder. Keep going. Stay the course. Beginnings can be daunting and endings can be achieved. It’s middles that stall and frustrate and intimidate those who want easy answers and quick conclusions. Middles are demanding. Middles mask and are messy. Middles require constancy with compromise; divergence before convergence. Middles aren’t glitzy, glamorous, or deeply rewarding unless you’re the one who stayed with it when others bailed. And if you were diligent and worked hard and made it happen, handing it off to the finishers has its own unsung reward: the knowledge that you did what others wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t know how.
Aspire for more in your life. Be it more happiness or humor; more money or mastery; more time or tenacity, more friends, better friends, or wiser friends who are as good to you as you are to them.
Do what it takes to make whatever you want that is meaningful, happen. You may not get as far as you’d like in the time that you have to get there, but you would have made the effort. That alone might be your legacy. That you went for it. That you believed yourself worthy of a cause so deserving that you gave it your all.
