Happy New Year 2022
Please click on image to play video
Happy New Year 2022
This week, I promise I will be short. Very short. And based on feedback, I am replacing the audio version with a video. This way, folks who want to read can continue to read, folks who want to listen can continue to listen, and those who want to watch can do that. Hopefully optimizing flexibility. Just click on the video above with my face and it will play in your ears! I might also put future posts in their own channel so you can curate your own video playlists. Hopefully, that could be useful. We shall see and we shall learn. Ideas are always welcome.
As I have said before, I love the spirit of this season of beginnings. It feels like we are surrounded by love and best wishes. Mulligans, second chances, and "try-agains" are in the air. It's a time when humanity itself feels more forgiving, more vulnerable, and more open to new possibilities. Something I think we all need more than just during a few days a year.
This year, more than most, it feels like we all deserve a break. I am hopeful we can now leave the past in the dust. Let's take a break from the list of grievances we hold towards others, politics, governments, or the future. Yes, there are many challenges that need to be addressed. But we can only do so with a renewed and elevated spirit, recharged energies, and a more open and kind attitude. ‘Tis the season to do just that.
I thank all of you for engaging so frequently and enthusiastically during the past year, and I do look forward to an even more active community of "elevators" next year. I commit to digging deeper, looking further, and doing a better job bringing perspectives and ideas to those who find them useful.
While I typically don't write "resolutions," I am committing myself to 3 main categories of objectives for the year ahead:
Moderation - being calmer, eating less, sleeping more, calming down, and certainly not investing myself emotionally in things I can't affect. I feel like my entire "dial" of life could be turned down a few notches. Not easy for me, but I think this is a good time to do it.
Stoicism - the more I live and learn the more I get back to the Stoics. I am going to meditate often in 2022, embracing the idea of "Amor Fati" which both Aurelius, Epictetus, and later Nietzsche embraced as a core philosophy of a happy life: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens to happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.” Or, said differently, in a more contemporary form: Happiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.
Conversion - I will try my best to find opportunities to convert problems into potential, cynicism and doubt to optimism and action, and wherever there is a lack of love, bring plenty of it! I will be more aware of any time I am a distanced spectator. Life is the kind of game where we must all be in the arena. There are far too many opinions from the sidelines.
Here are a few things worth listening to:
Ryan Holiday has a great daily stoic challenge for those who really want to get serious about change. You can watch the video here and sign up for the course
Jamil Zaki, a Professor at Stanford, recently gave this TED talk about the Cynicism Trap. I think we all can relate to falling into this mental malaise. And it is not a good place to be.
Finally, this article by Philip Howard I think so powerfully captures what concerns us with our current culture but also beautifully also reminds us who we are and why we can and must do better than this.
I will now take break for 2 weeks and use the time to marinate and meditate around all the things I have so many reasons to be grateful for. This community is certainly a powerful force in that strong current of appreciation.
I will be back in your inbox Sunday, January 9th.
Happy New Year. Let's make 2022 the year when it happened!
