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Hey , The end of a year has always been quite an odd experience for me. I've always felt that I should get into the habit of using the changeover of a number on a calendar as a way to mark the closing off of a year and the start of a new one. New beginings, right? Well, for me it's always been a very liquid thing where a couple of seconds and a countdown to midnight on the 31st is never enough to truly represent a new beginning. Even though I've always used the latter parts of December to reflect on the year gone by and to set goals for the New Year, I've never truly given myself a blank canvas to start something fresh. Looking back at my 2013, that same mentality was probably the biggest mistake I made: I exited WooThemes (which I founded in 2007 and worked on for 6 years) and even before the final documents were signed to effect this, I had already been working on my new startup for a couple of months. That lead to one of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make: to press pause on my new startup, PublicBeta. In the past 6 weeks, I've experienced something I've never experienced before (even if this was fleeting): 100% undistracted, free, thinking time. For the first time ever in my life it feels like I truly have a blank canvas as I head into the New Year and the next journey(s) of my life. And that scares me shitless. I don't say that because I pity myself or because I'm looking for sympathy, but having a blank canvas with seemingly infinite options is a completely different challenge to every other year. In the past, both my reflection and goal-setting had a very similar trend: how can I improve my life / relationships / health / WooThemes / etc? Since I already had a canvas with a half-painted picture, the theme was one of incremental tweaks and improvement. Having a blank canvas though poses a very unique set of questions: Where do I start? Which of these 10 things should I start on? What's my real (underlying) goal or aim? How do I relate and identify to any of these pursuits or activities? Even though I've had 6 weeks to think about this, I don't think I have a perfect (or even a great) answer just yet. What I have however figured out though is:
Along with this, I've made the decision to write even more in 2014 and I specifically hope to write about my experiences relating to taking a break, recovering from the journeys that ended in 2013 and also preparing myself for new adventures in 2014 and beyond. So as of the first week of January, I hope publish new content on my blog almost daily and I'll also return to my habit (discipline!) of publishing a weekly newsletter. Thanks for following my journey this past year and I'm keenly excited to share both my journey with you in 2014, but also hear your stories about adventures, risks, mistakes made and challenges faced. As always, if there's anything that I can do to help you, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail. Cheers Adii PS. Click here to stop receiving these e-mails from me. |