It's the new year, and I'm a little tired

This time feels kind of different, doesn't it?

Happy 2024! And a warm welcome to everyone who's newly subscribed.

This week's newsletter will be a short one. I had written exactly 1776 words before realising I was no longer connecting with what was appearing on the page, so I shelved that draft to start over.

But here we go.

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When it comes to the idea of change, one common way of thinking is that one should just do, and not fall prey to analysis paralysis. As this thinking goes: the more we do, the more feedback we get, and the faster we can fail and iterate our way to a successful outcome.

In other words, it is action that creates momentum. Unlike what we might sometimes hope for, it is simply not possible to think your way into making things happen.

While I've found this to be generally true, I've also been observing a shift in both myself and my peers:

When we're younger, our main resources are our energy and enthusiasm. We're fresh out of school, eager to make a dent in the universe, and can compensate for what we lack in wisdom and experience with grit and a sheer appetite for activity, learning, and failure.

At some point, this changes.

With time, our realities start teaching us certain (subjective) truths about how life works. We get older; we get tired, jaded, resentful, comfortable. Some of us settle for the status quo, some learn to numb and cope.

It gets increasingly harder to do hard things. Yet because it is not so easy to opt out of bills, responsibilities, status games, and personal anxieties, we are all—in our own unique and inventive ways—hobbling onwards, keeping it together and making it work.

Or, your life isn't as bad as what I've just described. Instead, while things aren't horrible, you live with a perpetual, low-level hum of anxiety in the background reminding you that you could be doing more, there's this thing you've been neglecting, something feels a little misaligned, and so on.

And to some extent, we all learn to live with this hum.

I've written previously about experiencing burnout. Often, burnout is a cement truck that crashes through the window. It wakes you up, screams in your face, renders you completely helpless. Sometimes, however, burnout can be like a slow spreading disease. It starts with deciding to care a little less, and ends with the realisation that you've been sleepwalking through life for the last 5 years.

Either way, one of burnout's more imperceptible aftershocks is that it erodes your ability and willingness to simply brute-force things. It becomes harder to ‘just do' something if you don't have a deeper sense of purpose, or you're not convinced it will lead to the outcome it promises.

As we enter the new year, many people I know have started off sprinting. They have both urgency and clarity; they know exactly what they want and how their lives will look like in 12 months.

Less noticeable, however, is that there are just as many (if not more) people who have trudged into the new year with heavy boots. They know that they should be aspiring to bigger, better, more, but they're also a little tired. 2023 was a difficult year, and it always just feels like there's never enough time to stop and reflect on how you dealt with it all.

As someone asked me the other day, "What do you do when you don't want to do anything?"

In this vein, I've been thinking a lot about the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format as a frame for navigating my life. (Growing up, I had a Nintendo Legend of Zelda adventure book that I would read repeatedly from cover to cover despite having completed every puzzle and explored every possible narrative. The book couldn't have been more than 100 pages, and yet I was obsessed.)

While I'm fortunate to do work where I no longer force myself to do things I don't want to, this person's question made me think about how it is not always easy for me to know the difference between taking care of myself and taking the easy way out.

But when I am confronted with such questions, what has been useful is to ask myself, "What am I choosing in this moment?"

Choosing, to me, is not just about the action. It is also about being conscious of the consequences I am willing to accept as a result of that action.

In other words, what adventure am I choosing to embark on?

Some examples of how I have chosen to think about a choice I'm making:

• I am choosing to do what I think is right instead of what my boss is telling me to do, and accepting the risk that I may lose their trust (and potentially my job), because the alternative is to go against my own values, which will feel like I'm betraying myself.

• I am choosing to pursue my career at my own pace, and accepting that I may make less money for now, because this will allow me to create room for the curiosities and relationships that are important to me.

• I am choosing to do this very specific difficult thing and leaning into the discomfort of it because I'm tired of trying to avoid it whenever it happens, and want to know that I am capable of confronting challenging moments in my life.

It helps me examine the inverse as well:

• If I'm choosing not to do something, what am I really choosing?

• Am I choosing comfort over growth? Or am I choosing the rest and recovery that I need?

• If choosing this means that I lose out on all these things, am I okay with that?

At least for me, this approach is what helps me to make decisions with both conviction and lightness. When I'm able to create the space for myself (even if it's just a few minutes) to connect to my sense of purpose, I can act quickly and effortlessly, even if it's to do things that I absolutely dislike.

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From running a media company to scaling teams and developing leaders in a fast-growing tech org, I've always done work with a deep focus on people.

As a coach, I work with anyone wrestling with questions like:

• How can I make more of an impact at work? How can I be more of myself in the workplace? How do I be more of a leader, and not just a manager?

• How do I figure out who I am and what I want out of life? How can I worry less and take more action? How do I feel less stuck?

• How can I let go of the past and move towards the future with more courage? How can I build a healthier relationship with myself?

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Think of it as buying me a coffee every month!

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