At the end of yesterday’s post I linked to the page on my site that talks about what these 2012 Day by day posts are about. It stings a little in my heart doing so because I haven’t achieved what I set out to do. Things have turned out differently from what I thought.
As much as I really dislike not doing what I say I’m going to do, I’m not sure I have any regrets about this year. I have a big bunch of learnings but not really any regrets. There are things that I would have approached differently and things I would have changed but I don’t regret the choices I made or the way things turned out. It’s shaped this year and taken me to where I am today. Changes in our founder team and freelance contracts, which I after all have been dependent on, have had to take priority. I’ve acknowledged that under certain circumstances when things are in flux (like if you’re co-founder is in or out) and other commitments demand your time, there is little point working yourself to the limit across too many things. I’ve prioritised speaking and teaching commitments and I’ve prioritised the smaller but still time consuming things like research and reading up on things. But it’s not what I had in mind. This is what I had in mind and what I wrote on that page about the 2012 Day by day posts:
For a long time I’ve collected ideas and dreamt of making them into something tangible.
2012 is about making at least three of them happen. This is a record of that journey.
I have’t made at least three of them happen. None are actually live, unless you count the holding page for byflock which I don’t really count. I haven’t achieved my goal. I won’t call it a failure, because I haven’t really tried to make them happen. But I haven’t achieved my goal for the year and for that I am a bit disappointed. At the same time I’m very grateful for what this year has brought and for the situation I am now in, both with byflock and my own freelance business.
When I wrote that line I didn’t know that byflock would be the company under which I would make some ideas come to life. And I didn’t know that my co-founder would be involved and that he later on would pull out. I just knew that I wanted to make things happen. The year got off to a great start. It was full steam ahead and progress, which is one of the things that motivate me the most, but then it slowed down and with that so did my motivation.
I can pinpoint exactly when it started to happen and I also know what went wrong. It wasn’t just one thing but a mixture of things combined with a number of circumstance. But it all started when I took on a freelance contract that took up way too much of my time. It was a project I really wanted to do, despite the hours. I could have terminated my freelance contract at any given point and gotten my life back, but it’s not who I am. I wanted to see it through. I wanted to do it and I was learning really good things during that project. I didn’t know it would take as much of my time and energy as it did, and had I known I would have done things differently, but I still would have taken the project. Just with a few more boundaries and things in place.
With that project however, and with the commitments that my co-founder had at the same time, things never went back to being the same as it had been for the first four months of the year. And here we are. It’s just gone past midnight and it’s the 28th of December and though two of the ideas are in the making and one remains in concept form, they haven’t yet been given a proper go. So as much as I didn’t achieve what I set out to do in 2012 I won’t call it a failure. 2012 has taken me down a different road that somehow have ended up being a setup and ease into it learning phase. Not my usual way of doing things but as long as I put my learnings from the last year into practice, particularly regarding the things I would have done differently, and make something better out of it going forwards, I’m on the right track of making 2013 into the year when it actually happens.
Tomorrow – Day 363 | Less talk. More doing
Image source: www.flickr.com/photos/chrismar/3195562690
