The year of intention has come to a close, and I have mixed feelings about it now that I am looking back. With only a single post made, the declaration of that theme, I feel guilty that I didn’t write more. Rereading that post, I find it funny that the end of 2022 year is when I drifted from my prior theme. As this year, I’m pulling myself back into the theme with the middle months being where I faded from acting with intention. Even in that unfocused time, I made progress in a variety of areas, and from it I think there is something to be learned.
When I sat down to put this together, I was at first disappointed in what I felt I accomplished for the year. However, is no failing at a theme. Using the lens of Intention in reviewing my year, I actually found some interesting insights.
What is a Yearly Theme?
To provide a primer for any unfamiliar. The yearly theme is a concept I discovered from the Youtuber CGP Grey. Instead of resolutions or even specific goals, a year is guided by a specific idea referred to as the yearly theme. Myke, the cohost of Grey’s podcast Coretx, uses the metaphor that a theme is a North Star. It’s a guide for decision making, not a destination.
In Grey’s theme video, he uses the examples of The Year of Reading or Health. Rather than “reading X books” the focus may start with books, but could shift to include reading articles, academic papers or interviews. This replaces a success or fail condition, with a focus on general improvement with what will actually work at a given time. One doesn’t fail the theme of reading by not hitting a specific number of books, but can be happy to see that much was learned by finding what they wanted to read.
Did someone say foreshadowing?
Objectives of Intention
In my last post, I pointed to three things I wanted out of the year of intention. I have mixed feelings about how these ended up, especially the first. The objectives I pointed to are:
- Read 40 books with a financial incentive on the line.
- Find my purpose
- Be more present and aware of my attention
I find it funny that I ended up declaring a specific reading goal since that was the example used by the video for why goals aren’t ideal. As the year came to an end, I made a mad sprint to finish the 10+ books needed in December. While I did hit that goal, I avoided a lot of other things that I wanted to in order to hit this arbitrary number.
What I want to focus on is less my declaration of a book count and dive into more what I think I wanted when I set this at the beginning of the year. The key piece to this was adding stakes to not doing something I’ve set out to do. I’ve long been guilty of sharing ideas or plans with no commitment to delivering. Taking a goal from past years that I’ve been close to completing, reading 40 books, and adding an incentive was a way of testing the efficacy of adding this element.
I have mixed feelings on how effective this incentive structure actually was. On one hand, I did complete the 40 book goal. I read more books in the last weekend of the year than I did in some entire months.. On the other hand, it’s led to me putting off other things so that I can read an arbitrary number of books. When I made the decision in January, I was hoping that the cost of not reading would inspire me to stay on top of my goal throughout the year, but in the end, it’s turned into a mad dash to the get to the finish line.
The next two I find more interesting to investigate. The concept of finding a purpose was one of the big things I wanted to take away from this year. In the last few years, I’ve had a number of visions for where I wanted to be in life. Ranging from business ideas to the people in my life, I’ve floated around the same handful of ideas of what I wanted to do, but rarely put in even the minimal effort of making these vision a reality.
In terms of presence and awareness, I found myself on the opposite side of this coin. Allowing myself to fall into the traps of algorithms, clickbait and a desire for distractions, looking back I can see the pitfalls of what led me into those things.
In both presence and purpose, I found myself coming back to the need for stronger systems to protect me from my impulses.
Distractions and Detriments
Looking back on the year, it was sometime around March or April, I dropped the habits and systems I followed for years at that point including my long running weekly review. There wasn’t an exact reason or inspiration to stop, one day I just found myself thinking, “why do I keep doing all of this stuff?”
I spent more and more time watching YouTube, going through the motions and not really thinking about what I was doing. I kept trying to get myself back on track simply writing the things I needed to do. I even tried putting together an ideal schedule for every day and even a high level plan for the remainder of the year after watching this Ali Abdaal video. Of course, this too fell to the wayside as my time became less and less focused.
A major change in the middle of the year was my purchase of a Steam Deck during the summer. The Steam Deck is a handheld gaming device similar to the Nintendo switch, however it’s really a handheld computer designed to play games from Valve’s PC gaming platform Steam.
Having this device led me to play a lot more games this year. Some were good experiences. Some were great games. Others were too good and led to some late nights going for one last round when I should have been asleep.
Inaction in Action
To end this off on a positive note, looking back on the year, I’ll share some examples of how I felt I succeeded in my vision for intention.
I had the privilege of giving a speech at my brother’s wedding. I had a loose idea of this speech written down for years. They were one of those couples you just knew they would be engaged at any time. When I dusted the draft off to start the real thing, it needed work. It had no real flow or direction and felt really flat. Thinking about the couple, I came to the themes of patience and ambition being something I saw in them individually and their relationship. Quoting some moments from my experiences with both of them and finishing things off with a quote from the writer Rainer Maria Rilke in which I actually disagreed with the writer’s premise. “Marriage is difficult and those who take it seriously are those who suffer and learn,” just feels like a little to intense for a wedding reception. Funny enough, I actually missed a whole section, as I was speaking from memory with only a few notes, my preferred method of speech delivery. The part I found funny was it felt so important while I was writing it late the night before, but just keeping it moving it felt natural. It’s not like anyone would have even noticed if I didn’t announce that I forgot where I was in the speech.
In October, I completed the Chicago Marathon for a second time. The time was a little slower than I was hoping, but was still happy with the result of 3:06:25. A ran 2:57 a couple years ago, so was hoping to keep the sub three hour streak. In another area of fitness, I competed in my first climbing competition. Competed is perhaps a strong word…let’s say participated. I was climbing problems, what climbers call the specific routes in bouldering, around the middle of the range for the group I was in. Once again, this was about what I expected from a performance perspective. What I enjoyed was being part of a community event with a lot of other climbers I’ve seen in the gym for years now.
As I mentioned, I played a lot more games than usual this year. Along with those games, I read more books then ever. With a group of friends, I watched plenty of movies – we worked our way through the Fast and Furious films for the release of Fast X. In consuming all of this media, I’ve juggled different apps from Goodreads to Letterboxd. These are useful as social media, but I don’t think they are the best for actually consolidating an ever growing list of media backlogs. That’s where Daryl Talks Games’s gaming backlog spreadsheet comes to help. Daryl released a video late last year and just released his followup after completing his backlog. The system is a simple Google Docs spreadsheet. I took his format and created new tabs for movies, books, TV and even board games. The most important element in my opinion is a separate tab that is simply a place to quickly jot down thoughts on a given piece of media. Simply writing down some thoughts helps to immortalize an experience.
Finally, one of my favorite experiences this year was working on a month long game jam with my friend Jack. He and I worked pretty hard on it, only to find I had misunderstood the exact time of the deadline for the jam – I blame timezones. After a push to wrap up a few final bugs and work out an actual objective for the prototype, I found out the submission deadline was predawn. The theme of the jam was anti-capitalism, so we focused on the process and didn’t want to stress or crunch on it. Finding out that I had screwed up the deadline left us with only the experience we gained along the way.
Working on games has always been a lot of fun and fulfilling. When it comes to the purpose element of this year, I definitely see making games as a part of that, even if I maintain it purely as a hobby.
Trying Out Before Buying In 