One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
The Year of Growth Through Saying "No" to Things
I’m a big fan of one-word themes for the year. (Big thanks to Annie Bacher for bringing this to my mind in her fantastic email this week!)
For the past several years, I’ve been anointing each year with a one-word theme. For some reason (to focus my motivation?) I always couch them in the phrase “The Year of Growth Through X” (where X is the one-word theme).
Which, although more prescriptive than leaving it as one word, still leaves the theme open. (Growth? What growth? Where growth? etc.).
This was The Year of Growth Through Writing. I started doing Morning Pages in the spring (and mostly still stick with it). Then, in the Fall, I did the Story Skills Workshop, which focused my writing a bit more.
And finally, ~2 weeks ago, I finished Jonathan Stark’s Email365 course. It’s a 5-day interactive online workshop for busy professionals who want to build their authority fast. It sets you up for shipping daily emails.
As you likely know if you’re reading this, I freaking did it, setting up my daily email list and starting to write and ship daily! (You also know I called it One Creative Moment, tying in with my Turner Creative brand and hinting at its brevity.)
My main takeaway is that it takes the full year for the theme to come to fruition. Learning that has given me the grace to take my time, slowly improving as I advance on my goal. 1% better each day.
For 2023, I’m tentatively going with “saying no to things” as my word. If you boil it down, that means my one-word theme is “No,” which is hilarious to me.
Laughing all the way,
James
P.S. Do you have a one-word theme? Hit reply and let me know! This year, last year, next year…whatever :)
P.P.S. For me:
2021 = Sleep (I started writing down my sleep every night (and still do). I finally hit consistent 7.5+ hrs/night monthly averages in September.)
2020 = Connection (lol pandemic, but actually, I ended up connecting A LOT with people online, solidifying most of the ones that have lasted in the Fall.)
One Creative Moment
One Creative Moment is a daily email for founders, owners, and creators. You'll get insights, irreverence, and inspiration to help you build a better business & live a more creative life.
One of the things missing from much of the “get AI to do everything for you” messaging is this fact: writing isn’t just a product, it’s a process. Yes, it’s nice to have “content.” But thinking that having it is the only outcome that matters is shallow and short-sighted. One of the things that has astounded me since I started writing daily(ish) emails back in November 2022 is how much it has changed me. It has vastly improved my ability to think—and to put those thoughts into clear, concise...
If you want to achieve more, do less. That is to say, build time into your day, your week, your year for quiet. In our house, following lunch, there is a period of mandated quiet time. It gives everyone a chance to do something they’d otherwise not do: nothing. It could be napping, reading, working on art, or even listening to something specific on headphones—as long as it’s quiet and done alone. For Kayte and I, it’s almost always napping, lol. During that time, we can recharge. We can...
“…We are ‘persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to make impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.’” This is Kate Raworth quoting Economist Tim Jackson in her book Doughnut Economics while discussing the power of aspiration in influencing human behaviour. Reading this, I realized that seeing (or at least feeling) this is what kept me from marketing for so long. (And what keeps me from engaging in much of its mainstream still.) I thought of it only as a...