Three Words for 2014
I hope you all have had a very happy, healthy, and most importantly SAFE holiday season. I know I have, despite a small head cold. In keeping with the tradition I started for myself last year, I am happy to present my Three Words for 2014.
For those of you unfamiliar with the exercise, it is discussed in “Amazing Things Will Happen” by CC Chapman and is originated from Chris Brogan. I strongly encourage you to take a look at it and see if this exercise is something that can help you.
I’m not going to discuss “Organize, Produce, and Live” too much in this post, as I went through them in some detail in my previous post, wrapping up 2013. Suffice to say if you’re interested in my thoughts on those words in context of last year, I encourage you to check it out. However, I will say that given 2013’s role as a ‘foundation’ year for me, I look to these words as a way to build off of that.
Create
This has its genesis in my writing and podcasting goals for 2014, and last year’s ‘produce’. But as I spoke with friends and colleagues about my three words, I realized that there was more to my list than just writing the next novel, editing the last one, and podcasting the current one. In 2014 I want to create. Not just worlds, characters, and stories for listeners and readers, but also I want to create new experiences and form new memories for myself. I don’t have a lot of experiences in my life. Well, no. That’s false. I do. But the experiences and memories I have are to a certain degree niche. They are of the type where ‘you had to be there’ and they don’t have a lot of re-telling value. So, in 2014 I will create. I will create opportunities. I will create worlds. I will create experiences and memories that will carry with me through 2014 and beyond.
Open
Building off of ‘create’ I, in 2014, will open myself up. I have always lived in a narrow confines of a comfortable space and as I look back on the past two years in particular, I come to realize that the narrow confines has only been getting narrower and narrower as I have inadvertently retreated. There are many reasons for that retreat, some easily deducible, others not. But as my world has been closing around me. It was rightly (and embarrassingly) pointed out a day or two ago that my world had become “work, sleep, CPA, and [games]”. How true that has become and I’m embarrassed to admit it and up until recently I hadn’t even realized what was going on around me. No wonder I’ve been less and less satisfied with the overall picture, I’ve been retreating deeper and deeper. That ended on 12/31/13 and in 2014 I open myself up, force myself out of my comfort zone and begin reversing the contraction that occurred in my world over the past few years.
Relax
This is more than just sitting on the couch with a beer and watching the game. I’ve done plenty of that over the years. No. This is more about an overall state of worry and anxiety. Those of you who know me best know that if there’s a Con in May, I’ll be trying to nail down specifics in November. At my previous job, I operated under a constant state of worry over one thing or another. I have been described as ‘high strung’ on more than one occasion. My father has a poster of a stopwatch that shows exactly what worrying and consternation can do. That watch shows that 40% is ‘useless’ worry over things that can not be controlled. In my case it’s probably closer to 60%. So in 2014 I learn to relax. I learn to accept that when I’m writing, I’m allowed to suck. I learn to accept that I don’t need to plan 6 months ahead of a convention, that there will be plenty of time to see and catch up with everybody on my list of people to see. I learn to find a way to truly accept the things I can not control and not just say I do. This is not to say I learn to not care or that I learn to be oblivious. Far from it. Simply put, I learn to put things into their proper context, relax, and go with the flow instead of trying to paddle up stream.
So, there they are- 3 words for 2014. I look forward to tackling them, and to sharing with you all my progress as the year develops. I encourage you to constructively keep me accountable to these words. And I can’t wait to see how this year plays out.
Relax and Openly Create.
Happy New Year!
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