Dear friends,
Sitting down to write this Podcast, I asked myself:
What do I need to hear most?
My realisation:
A guide for venturing into the unknown.
Here’s what I came up with:
2024: A Blueprint for Creatives
2024 is upon us, fangs bared and dressed with desperate menace.
I know that New Year’s Day arrives as its own challenge.
If you’re like me, it is one of shell shock.
We’ve feasted while seeing out the final part of the year and then celebrated the coming of the new.
And yet, when we wake up on the 1st, we’re deprived of the gusto we felt amidst the swirl of the night before.
Funny how our fearlessness deserts us when faced with a grey dawn, a beating head and the looming sceptre of the future.
Perhaps that’s why our New Year resolutions falter.
It’s not that we’re incapable of starting new.
It’s that we feel burdened at having to do it on an agenda.
And perhaps there’s no day in the year we feel less like starting than on the 1st of January.
So, today’s Podcast is a message to the part of me that needs to hear it the most.
A map as I venture out into the unknown.
I want to call upon the best of myself to face it.
I trust that by sharing this, you might discover some ideas and encouragement, too.
Because whether we like it or not, the future is before us.
The only question is, how are we going to face it?
10 RESOLUTIONS
RESOLUTION 1: COMMIT TO RENEWAL
So here’s the thing, guys: despite the void, despite the worry, despite how dam uncool this may be - I believe in New Year.
I know it’s become trendy to look at it through weary and cynical eyes, as if New Year’s resolutions are yet another commodified idea, like Christmas.
Do not let your resolution be hijacked by the cynics.
Whether or not we like it, New Year’s Day IS an opportunity.
And it’s an opportunity not just because it comes around once a year but precisely because we have to confront reality - grey, harsh and daunting as it may be.
For me, New Year’s Day is my yearly plunge pool.
Where I get to shock off my dead skin.
Where I get to forgive myself.
Where I get to choose between cowering before my life or fronting up to each and every aspect, ominous and terrifying as it sometimes appears.
So the first thing I have to say is this.
No matter what has been, here is your opportunity.
If there’s one thing I have learned in my life, it is that your life does not have to be as it has been.
I know we lose faith.
I know we doubt ourselves.
I know that despite our best efforts, we feel it always dam well lands in the same place.
Yet, there is good stuff out there for us.
All I know is that when you resolve, with every aspect of your being, to start fixing the details of your life, one by one, you see progression.
It doesn’t happen immediately. It is an investment you make. And though you do not see the results quickly, you do reap rewards from a renewed attitude. And it is your attitude, as much as anything, which determines the course of your life.
It is New Year’s Day, and this is my first resolution:
I am committing to renewal.
RESOLUTION 2: KEEP MOVING FORWARD
New Year’s Day is the true Equinox. When we move from what has been and into what will be.
I cherish these moments when the past and future are in harmony. Perhaps we avoid the feeling New Year’s Day brings because it asks us to be in the moment.
For many of us, the moment feels deeply uncomfortable.
Our lives are not where we want them to be.
Or we realise that having been exactly where we wanted to be, it no longer fits. Something has been speaking to us, but we have ignored the voice.
What version of you is calling you?
Why not today listen to that voice?
Whoever convinced you that becoming who you might be is an impossibility?
We shut off from the idea of the New Year because we transpose our own illusion and our disappointment onto it.
New Year is not about transformation itself.
It is about the commitment to go after it like a man whose head is on fire seeks water.
People who say nothing changes on New Year’s Day do so because they’re so desperately disappointed that nothing does change on New Year’s Day.
But it is not about transformation.
It is about one’s commitment to go towards it.
My life changes every New Year.
Because despite the pain, the hurt, the failure and the disappointment, I chose to go again.
I cannot control the fates.
I cannot ask life to give me what I want.
But I can vow before it that whatever it throws at me, I will choose to become who I can be, irrespective of how that happens to play out.
I will get into the ring.
I will take the blows.
And when I go down, I will get up again.
And then counterstrike.
As Rocky Balboa puts it:
“It's not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.”
It is New Year’s Day, and this is my second resolution:
I will keep moving forward.
RESOLUTION 3: DOUBLE DOWN
In December, I finished my documentary “The Isolation Diaries”. Though there is more work to do on the project as a whole, it was a critical milestone for me.
Why?
Because I earned the invitation to my future.
I know many of you will find yourselves right in the heart of big projects as the year begins. And I know that it can feel like a terrible weight to begin a new year with the burden of so much still unfinished.
So before I get to my own resolution, a word for you guys: double down.
At the beginning of 2023, I felt so weighed down by “The Isolation Diaries”. I was already three years into it and wondered if it would consume me for the rest of my life. The reason I am here a year later with a completed film is that I doubled down. I resolved that no matter what it took, I would get the dam thing finished by year’s end. It doesn’t matter if a project takes far longer than you think.
What matters is that you first forgive yourself and then apply yourself.
For me, it took an extra year than I anticipated. I go into 2024, finally, with a clean slate and with the peace of having completed something.
Believe me, it is worth it. Double down.
It is New Year’s Day, and this is my third resolution:
I will double down double on my life.
RESOLUTION 4: START WITH THE DIFFICULTY
All of us are trying to build something in life.
And the reality is that for most of us, growth is desperately slow and change incredibly hard to manifest.
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