Intention For Sharing

These yearly reviews have become something of a tradition around these parts.

A tradition I look forward to, each new year a chance to reflect and observe, to count, and be held to account. It’s a chance for you to measure my optimism against reality and ask how well things went according to plan, and if not, what did I learn.

Just like a yearly review has become tradition (this is the third now), so too has the way they start by setting intentions, so here goes.

Accountability

As much as I hope you receive a LOT from reading this, I’m also driven by an ulterior motive in writing it.

I want to give this to my future self.

Writing these reviews feels a little bit like bootcamp for personal growth. It’s fun, challenging – grueling even – but I’m SO much better off after finishing it.

It’s a chance to put my values out there in public. It’s scary, but putting myself out into public observation, where scrutiny is possible, has done incredible things for me. One day I will grow enormous organisations, and writing in public will always be a part of that process.

These reviews allow me to nurture the seedlings of the values I hold. One day those values will offer shade in service of millions of people.

Keep It Real

I want this post to somewhat show the bone and sweat and life that goes into all this branding.

It can be a weird game, trying to build a reputation, grow an image beyond my control, serve people at a higher and higher level.

It can become really appearance focused and I see these reviews as a chance to show more of the wounds that led to the scars, rather than just the scars themselves. I hope my stories of how I got them will inspire you to realise it’s normal. The struggle. The fear. The doubt. The uncertainty. It’s normal and it’s how strength is made.

A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
– John Maxwell

It makes me incredibly uncomfortable to be this real about my ambitions.

My instinct is to shy away from laying grand claims.

Who am I to wish for such things? Who am I to want to serve on a massive scale? To help countless people and turn this world into a more courageous place? Who am I to stand up against the tide and claim enough significance to even try and put myself out there?

Writing these reviews gives me the chance to wrestle with this discomfort, to place my hopes on a pedestal and challenge the fear telling me to play small and keep quiet.

I have another reason to publish these extremely private thoughts, lessons and measurements out loud too. But I’ll get to that later.

Gratitude

As I write this I feel so much gratitude for the giants who have gone before me and inspired this brand.

I’ve been moved by so many incredible writers in my life I could spend the rest of this entire post just raving about them and telling you why you should read them, but I’ll probably save that for when I get around to making a Hall of Courage Icons or something. Sign up for emails if you promise not to relegate me to the spam category!

Reciprocity

This year has massively been about reciprocity.

In my relationship with Marissa. She’s come leaps and bounds in overcoming the challenges of her past. Navigating traumas which have been coming up one after another this year, pretty savagely if I’m honest. But she turns in toward the wave and keeps the spirit of a fighter about her.

She inspires me constantly in her ferocity and how she will fight to tear through her own defences. It’s exciting to be in a partnership where we’re both driven to go straight into the flames of life, secure in each other, ourselves and the faith that we will get through anything (even losing one another!).

In my mentors. It almost feels like a cheat or a cop out somehow to use the word reciprocity to describe my mentors. But I heard this definition of reciprocity which kinda made me tilt my head and say ‘huh’. One person this year described reciprocity as the act of creating a feedback loop of wanting to repay a debt.

It’s a funny definition which I believe I once would have taken issue with, but after having people sew into me so selflessly now for so long, with so little material reward, I understand. Debt is 100% the feeling after having received service and commitment so profound that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pay it back. This is the fruit of having good parameters around a culture of mentorship. I will work forever to pay this feeling forward to others.

In my friendships. I’ve had people show up for me big this year. Helped me step through personal struggles over and over. It counts for so much to know there are people in my corner. Once upon a time that knowledge was simply a comfort, but after some big ups and downs this year I can tell you it was more than comfort. It was discomfort too.

Friends who’ve had the confidence to ask me how I was really doing. To challenge my facade of having my shit all together and nudge me toward courage when I wanted to hide behind my usual confident air. It means a lot to know I’ve got people who will call my bluff and not let me fall into self deception.

In my colleagues. I’ve been navigating a new role with more responsibility and lots more things that can go wrong through the year. And yet the people I work with have made this a pleasure. I’ve been supported when I struggled, I’ve had people back me when I needed it but also let me know when I’ve gotten lost in the weeds and need to come back to civilization lol.

It’s been humbling and incredibly rewarding working next to these people and I hope I can make their investment into me worth their while. I’m doing my best to pass forward the support and encouragement to the people we support in mental health work.

Big Challenges

Of course it wouldn’t be a yearly review without capturing the struggle!

And what a struggle it’s been. Don’t get me wrong, I’m deeply grateful for the challenges I’ve gotten overcome this year.

I’m learning more and more the importance of having a big rock in the road, a small pebble in the shoe… Or even a mountain to move.

Speaking of…

Momentum Building and Momentum Breaking

This one has layers.

For example, once I was staying at this gorgeous resort for a family wedding and I pulled up my laptop to log in and do some office work.

The look Marissa gave me basically curdled my insides but I just continued, confident I could handle the conversation when it finally happened.

It happened.

We had a big fight that day and these fights (about working while on holiday) came to be a sort of standard measurement over the year. Like a Geiger Counter to see how close my internal disfunction was getting to radioactive levels. For example we got back from a leadership conference in Melbourne earlier in the year and I had done SO WELL to not work or even laptop while I was away!

But as soon as I got back it hit me like a truck, all this work had built up and it was like an avalanche of tension had been just waiting for the right time.

I learned this year that I have a problem with momentum.

Or more accurately, I have a narrative running about a problem with momentum.

It’s a narrative that says the following.

When I break momentum I struggle to get it back. I feel terrible if I’ve squandered it and broken a good working streak. The implication being if I respected my momentum I would have held onto it.

This rigid inflexibility causes me a lot of suffering. Others around me too.

If I had to guess I’d say it’s the remnants of a childhood of avoiding homework and schoolwork until it all came crashing down in a pile of my old man’s disappointment and anger. He didn’t understand why I was always behind, but neither did he sit down and help when I asked for it.

As a kid who always struggled in school (can you believe that? it’s true) and didn’t get help from his parents, I get these huge feelings of overwhelm return whenever I’ve lost momentum. It’s like I’m a kid again and this raw unprocessed pain comes back to haunt me, interrupting me from being present, destroying my connection with my loved ones, all until I can do the thing.

But doing the thing is, of course, not as simple as that. I still have avoidance and procrastination patterns which tie me up, throw me in the boot and take control.

Defining this momentum breaking narrative has been huge this year, with the theme coming up multiple times over the whole year. It’s a narrative I’d love to replace with the following.

I am someone who changes gears with ease. I swap lanes gracefully in my life, with existential agility, confident I’ll get straight back to task once resources allow. I know precisely when the moment arrives that resources do allow, because watching my energy and patterns of behaviour has become super easy to maintain. I achieve all this with mastery of priority management because I’M A DAMN TIME LORD.

I work on this flexibility of task management consistently and aspire to be as well refined in my time perception as my time hero Buckminster Fuller (yes, I have a hero of time, click here to learn why).

Business Hurdles

Marissa and I packed away the business we started together which was an immense challenge for me personally, much less for her. It was a case of my perception catching up with her reality a few months behind the fact.

In the end I’m glad I finally caught on but it did take me a little bit too long. Which speaks to a somewhat frightening pattern of not quite hearing what she’s trying to tell me sometimes. As though I have an internal filter that I wash what I hear from her through. It’s a little disappointing to notice and it’s the same thing that prevented me from ever really listening when she’s said so many times that she’s neurodivergent until one day she was sitting across the table from another good friend of mine (who’s very direct about their autism) and yeah, it struck me like the truth for the first time.

So while on one hand I’m disappointed it took me that long to clue in, it did serve as a big flag to listen with more depth and intention when she tells me something and my instinct is to explain it away somehow.

On the less personal side of business one huge tenet of entrepreneurship I picked up over many years is to make risks you can afford to lose which have a high upside. If the possible upside is very high and the risk to get started is low, then why not give it a go and see what we can learn?

This mindset of risking something replaceable or small enough to justify was a big part of what gave us the confidence to get into business for ourselves in the first place. When we decided to shut down our previous business, this mindset is what allowed us to put our emotional well-being first, releasing the timeline for our big hopes and dreams, finding another path and adjusting our expectations accordingly.

Moved House in the Middle of Hell Week

Things got VERY spicy this year when I moved us out of our apartment in Kangaroo Point, into the heart of Brisbane city.

The level of stress was… Feisty.

Marissa’s employment had just blown up as our lease was ending, as if that wasn’t nightmare enough, the rental market was absolutely insane at the time so each time I put an application in it felt terrible knowing I was competing with entire families for little shoeboxes in the city!

It’s true we could have decided to live further out in the burbs but I know that’s not what’s best for us long term, as being here in the heart of it all will make it way easier to remove excuses and do the hard work. Building our brand, building our secondary income, investing in people, networking, reaching out and making an impact.

So yeah, we ended up getting very creative, fighting like hellcats to get the place of our dreams and then… we got it!

Moving was a nightmare and luckily I had a mate who offered to help. We spent the day together and at one point he asked me how I was doing, really doing, and I caught the lie before it came out ‘Well thanks’ and told him the truth, that I was just about as stressed as I ever had been.

He stood back, thought a moment, and replied with ‘Yeah, I can tell. Wanna know how?’ ‘Of course’, I replied. ‘You calmly stood there and told me that this is as stressed as you ever have been.’

He illustrated clearly the massive gap between my feelings of tension and my expression of them. This struck me as quite interesting and bizarre. I’ve always known I had a stoic facade, but my perception of it never quite pierced to that depth until Kyle showed me what he saw. It was a moment both funny and profound. I believe I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.

Personal Stuff

Last and most significant, people around us have had a very hard time this year.

Close friends and family struggling with finances, covid, relationships, even suicide, it’s been intense and it’s been my absolute pleasure to support my loved ones where I can.

But there’s a friction I have to live with around that. I want to do more. I want to provide more, to help more, to shoulder more of the burden.

I want the freedom to be able to say ‘Yep, I’m on my own clock, family comes first’. It’s funny because I used to talk about how I believed money isn’t everything. But now I realise that was a lie because I spent (and spend) 40 hours a week chasing after it.

Not being able to help my loved ones has been incredibly tough this year, knowing how much less stressful life would be navigating with more resources… It’s lit a fire in my belly.

Big Milestones

Loads of struggles, but loads of triumphs as well.

I found this artbook from over ten years ago while helping my dad move house this year. It absolutely blew me away to stare straight into the heart, mind and soul of Said from over a decade ago.

To think that I had such high aspirations while I was so pitifully low, so broken down in mind and spirit, it fills me wonder and gratitude.

I’m not sure where this optimism and boldness comes from, I don’t see it in my parents at all if I’m honest.

Check it out.

@saidwithcourage

I hope this inspires you. #journaltok #personalgrowth #traumatok #recovery #fypシ

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Complete Rebranding of SWC

I redesigned the website!

Can you BELIEVE it.

I actually finally did it. It was a really fun process and the beginning of me starting to take my brand and go pro with it.

I paid a family friend for her time and she gave me a tonne of feedback about website design. The old version of the site basically looked like a nasty HTML page with garishly bright strips of colour on top and bottom and black text on white background elsewhere.

It was not pretty.

I actually designed the website using Notion as a bit of a draft build so it was fun to take a mindset of like, organising the change. Turns out that counts for a lot emotionally and psychologically.

It might look like I’ve got a plan around these parts but the truth is the plans I make for this brand are usually cobbled together with duct tape at the very last hour, hell even after the fact. It’s like, imagine trying to build a house and piece together the blueprints based on the random additions of rooms, hallways, doors and everything else you’ve already thrown on in a jumble of unpredictability.

That’s basically been my journey with this website and the brand!

So yeah, setting out a plan for renovations, first with design and consultation, then with drafting and testing, then finding a whole new wordpress theme (a free one mind you!) to pull it all off, learning the new theme and building it all out… It’s kicked off the brand in a much more organised and intentional direction.

I even asked a friend to offer feedback on the homepage design before I went live with the changes!

Published… A Lot!

I discovered Atomic Essays this year.

A few months later I turned to my partner in one part awe, one part shock horror and told her I’d published tens of thousands of words over a few months.

Now… If you’re anything like me that would sound near impossible.

Because I didn’t have it in me. Or so I always believed. I didn’t have the discipline, time management, priority management, so many things.

This massive push has been a big belief breaker. Because I’m finally, truly, deeply writing for others.

I have one friend who is basically a die hard fan. He reads whatever I ask him to, gives me awesome feedback on it, and when I told him about the embarrassing blog I actually regained access to from many years ago he even asked to see it!

Well hell no aint nobody ever seeing that thing because the writing was so atrociously self serving and self centered I wouldn’t want to lash anyone’s unsuspecting mind with such poor quality thinking.

This recent publishing push represents a clear distinction from that budding, terrible writer I was many years ago.

I think… as a teenager I was driven by wanting someone to be interested in me. In my thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings. I wanted someone to pay as much attention to me as I did to everyone around me. So I externalised the internal, I poured my vein little heart into that corner of the internet, but never had the courage to tell anyone about it.

I knew deep down that I was driven by the wrong thing, I was charting a course off the wrong star.

Well fast forward to just a month ago and I’m in Melbourne for another conference when an absolutely beautiful associate (inside and out) sits me down for a moment because they ‘have something to show me’.

The bar around us is pulsing with the afternoon Melbournite crowd and we’re in-between getting our hearts absolutely blasted by speakers of extremely high calibre.

Des has a bit of a gentle, cheeky way about him. He’s always drawing you in to share a secret.

Des shows me his tablet with an Atomic Essay about reciprocity I wrote months ago.

Saved.

Like, downloaded and saved.

I can’t describe to you what that’s like.

Writing is a solitary, often lonely experience.

It’s like ultra long distance archery. Imagine shooting an arrow so far and so high that you don’t get to watch it land because it goes beyond the curvature of the planet.

You just have to pull back your bow, aim true based on what you believe and what you have faith in, put everything you can into the aiming and setting and pulling, all the might you can muster, and then you let it go.

And day in, day out you show up in faith, not sure if your arrows are landing, maybe now and then you get a little signal, a comment or a heart or something.

You only have other well established writers to compare against, they shoot an arrow and the world lights up with fireworks and celebrations. Reporters flock, stories are told and the impact and fanfare look nice from a distance.

So you try not allow that to distract you, because if you do… You’ll just fall into the mindset of a 15 year old kid who’s lonely and wants to feel seen and heard by his parents.

So day in, day out you just show up and notch your next arrow and let it fly.

And then months later out of the blue someone stops you. Not with a ‘like’. But genuinely stops you in your tracks to say ‘hey, that arrow landed and it hit me in the heart’.

I can’t describe to you what that’s like.

New Job + Promotion

I started the year in a new role, massive blessing that came with massive challenges.

I had a big learning curve.

By the time I landed the next promotion about six months in I started to get really intentional about the process. Ever notice that stepping into a new role can be a total mess? I realised it probably didn’t need to be.

I organised my thinking, started making notes and really leaning in to my mentors, asking more and more to try to make sense of what I was seeing, the direction and flow of information, who made what decisions, what ways I could help and what ways I only thought I was helping.

This process of standing back and observing my surroundings like a scientist, like an entrepreneur, meant I wasn’t waiting for somebody to give me a map, I started drawing my own.

I was invited and flew down to Sydney to speak with some colleagues in front of the entire organisation! I’ve had some really fantastic feedback about it, it’s been humbling and terrifying and I’ll keep showing up with my best and my heart on my sleeve and hope it’s enough. I don’t quite face the same imposter syndrome I did when I was younger but it’s still incredibly nerve wracking, knowing that I’m putting my reputation on the line and saying things that might make me unpopular or put a target on my back.

Now that it’s been enough time to fully settle in I think I have a solid aim on what I can contribute here. I’m figuring out how to negotiate and navigate a corporate environment with more finesse. I don’t need to speak up as quickly any more, because I realise some battles need tact in order to win. Others are not actually worth the cost of winning. I’ve got to be in this for a long time in order to make the changes that call to me.

This past month I’ve been taking many leaves from my favourite marketers and applying them at work. Really simple stuff like the Strategy of Pre-eminence. Listening in depth to what people say they want.

I’ve started a small initiative to empower our volunteers at Lifeline to create and calculate the risks they’d like to take. To initiate small decisions and make small motions here or there. My aim is to one day create a strong, solid sense of mateship and connectedness.

My absolute wildest dream would be an organised body of volunteers who have the support, backing and training to hold community events. They could organise outreach events to bring suicide prevention into the smallest, darkest areas of society where it’s absolutely most needed. They could debate, refine and organise their knowledge so that process and procedure become tighter and tighter over time. They could develop workshops, hold professional developments, provide trainings to workplaces, communities, churches, mosques, synagogues, sports clubs, schools. We could have a volunteer base who are self led and self determined, speaking up for the needs of the people who they serve, we could build a pathway for non-profits and NGO’s to bake in accountability and co-design, building the services communities need right on the ground, removing the separation and healing the historical wounds institutions and medical industry has left on generations.

That’s the 10,000 foot view, for now it’s a meeting I hold at work once a week lol.

It’s challenging, I’m learning about the politics of navigating an enormous organisation that has political, economic and social ties in many different directions. It’s a hierarchical structure with a board of decision makers at the very top and people with less and less power all the way down. The more I try to support the people on the front line, the deeper I have to go into the complexity of the machinery under the hood. HR, Legal, Marketing, Quality, this is all standard stuff that any large organisation has to face, but it’s the first time I’ve ever faced it.

So… While it’s been lovely and rewarding to have those short term achievements and continue working toward those short term goals further out, I believe a huge part of my resilience at work (weathering many storms so to speak) has been due to a mindset of playing the infinite game.

I don’t just send an email to send an email, I learn how I can improve it so that all following emails get the benefit. Same thing with training someone. I don’t just sit on shift so that I can approve them or not approve them for service. I learn how I can connect and create more trust this time and forever after.

And now that I’m taking tiny steps toward community building I can see I’m again nurturing the skills which I will need when I build successful businesses, charities and campaigns of my own. Whether focused on video game design, permaculture, construction or any of the other long list of things that get me revved up, the skills of building parameters of culture around a community are going to compound.

I think a lot of people mistake their employment as a finite game.

They expect to be given a set of rules and goals, to be able to cross the finish line and be rewarded for it. But it’s not like that in real life. Goals change, rules change, even players change constantly and the more we expect our employer to create a finite game, the more we will struggle to adapt when life hits.

I don’t focus on doing an excellent job today so I do an excellent job today. I focus on doing an excellent job today so I do an excellent job tomorrow. The better I get at life today, the more prepared I am for the storm when it comes tomorrow.

I’ll have more resources and more capacity to be able to not only survive, but also thrive.

North Star

I love a good map analogy.

Because I make maps to everywhere, all the time.

A good map is the difference of returning somewhere and using the vague impressions and memories of my last visit, versus having a clear, well drawn pathway connecting all the important places.

I make maps of people, of myself, of my relationships between us, of my workplace, my finances, my minecraft builds, this brand, my future.

I make maps constantly, I’m basically a hobbyist cartographer but like, of internal dimensions not external ones. Half cartophrapher, half psychonaut.

The road map of my future has changed many times recently. The inflexibility mentioned earlier came to be updated and if the update doesn’t happen smoothly it can cause heaps of trouble.

Recently, the road map into my future has changed a bunch.

Keeping existential flexibility means having a good enough North Star that no matter what surprise the territory throws up, you know exactly which way to head towards.

It means it’s not so scary to do a full 180 and turn back if you see a dead end coming.

These dead ends happen. No matter what we set out to achieve in life, the pathway we pick isn’t always right right one to get there. We’re guaranteed to come to a stop down one road or another.

Here’s how my road map has changed in 2022.

In Life

I bet my full effort on a pathway that ended abruptly.

As mentioned above, the business I started with Marissa is put on the back bench. It was a pathway I was convinced was going to lead us to our North Star: the life of impact we both want.

It wasn’t to be.

So Marissa and I adjusted, we leaned into my mentors and now Marissa has been working with me to build our secondary income. It’s early days now and on our current trajectory it’ll be a lot longer before we’re both financially free, able to have children on our terms and live the way we want to live, and that’s ok.

We’ve got another path we’re walking. We’re wiser and more compassionate for the experience – and I’m a better listener!

I read a book this year called The Slight Edge, recommended by someone I have very high respect for.

The book gave me many things, one of which I call Observing Trajectory.

Like empathy, it’s an exercise in imagination. It asks of us, instead of seeing an apple and thinking about the boring, ordinary reality of the apple. Try to see it for what it could be made into. It could be made into rot. Into decomposition, and from there maybe into alcohol or social connection or profit or liquid courage or addiction. All within the one apple. It could be made into an orchard, for how many apples are contained within even one of its seeds?

We can observe the trajectory of this apples existence but it’s not like most people would think. I don’t observe an apple’s trajectory by watching what it gets made into. I watch the very tiny decisions of the people who hold it.

The decision to have a cigarette because ‘this one won’t kill me’ is a lie. It will kill you. The truth is, that cigarette does kill you, only it does so further in the future. Further into your trajectory.

The decision to take a seed and cultivate it shows an entire life and it’s simple to imagine the possibilities that might come out of that decision. Imagine the impact of breaking a cigarette in half. The easy breath after a long climb to the summit before sunrise. The feeling of the waves rolling beneath the board. The excitement in a wagging tail or a giggling grandchild each as thrilled as the other to be chased. It’s simple to imagine, if we just put the effort into casting a vision toward the future. Simple, but not easy. It takes an act of daring. An act of courage.

Let me show you what it looks like when I do it, to see into the roadmap of my life.

Marissa and I will have a thriving network of thousands of empowered people, backed by a robust culture of principled leadership.

We’ll start a family, our own kids or adoptees or a mixture of both, and fulfil the roles we’re itching to fulfil. Learning life again all over from the start through the eyes of someone figuring it all out, passing on and improving upon the love and values that we received.

We’ll leave an incredible impact on the lives of people around us, weaving abundance into everything we say and do, challenging the limits in ourselves thus permitting others to do the same.

We’ll start organisations and treat business as the petri dish to see which philosophies of impact, parameters of culture and principles of service are of most value to the world.

We’ll grow into politics and develop influence far above and beyond social spheres, creating programs, courses, trainings and systems to help organise people and solve problems that matter to us and people like us. Problems of hormones, problems of communication, problems of emotion the symptoms of which show up and affect every layer and every level of society.

We’ll show the world how to have relationships that thrive despite so many differences, in values, in trauma, in personality and even compatibility.

We’ll heal the way countless couples talk to one another and their families and loved ones, creating a ripple of high quality communication skills that spreads out across the country and the world.

That’s the road map reading the far side of trajectory, into the future. More close to home it all starts with this brand.

For Said With Courage

This brand will one day offer a training platform to gain courage.

Courage to speak up, to take risk, to take action.

It starts with two directions of going pro.

1. Mental health advocacy.

To this end I’ll be looking for way more chances to speak up. If there are podcasts I can share my story on, or collaborations where I can meet with other creators and offer value to their audiences, I’ll be taking the networking game to the next level in 2023.

2. Developing training and support materials for people who work in frontline mental health work.

There’s lots of ideas, lots of things I’d like to build out and create.

Reflective Practice Template

A tool to be able to easily and effectively collect personal data and observe your own practice in mental health frontline work. You’ll be able to download the template and start using it with ease that day, capturing the metrics important to you on shift. Whether that’s your feeling of Compassion Satisfaction, your personal level of effectiveness, or anything else you want to make it. It’ll be easy to download and use exactly as I’ve set out, improved upon the system I used for years in order to level up my listening skills. It’ll also be easy to change and adjust, and I’ll make related materials for that to help you decide where you’re at and what skills to target next.

Emails

I wanted a sequence of 20 emails written last year, instead I have 5. Written this last month. Over time it will grow into a long, robust and tailored journey to take you from wherever you’re at in listening and move you along at an easy pace to grow more and more confident in your ability to support people in crisis, step by step. Over the course of weeks and months you’ll refine your thinking and hone your skillset to a high level of nuance and sophistication.

Convo Break Down

A pdf to really break down a crisis dialogue into layers of depth. It’ll dive deep under the cover of complex trauma, show you a high level of understanding of the subtle signs to look out for when supporting someone through their personal nightmare. Might have different ones for different skill levels, might not.

Microskills Worksheets

There are so many layers of depth to high quality use of microskills. For example did you know you can apply subtle guide posts to conversations so that people open up more or less by simply choosing what kind of questions you ask? These layers of depth go very far down. To start with I’ll make simple pdfs that can be turned into further exercises and eventually courses to master these building blocks of listening.

Numbers

I’m notoriously good at setting number targets and then never looking at those targets again until next year’s review.

I’m ok with it! Because the purpose of setting targets is simply to get me moving, and that they have. If you’d like to check out the goals I set for myself this time last year, feel free!

You’ll find I did have a small section of Number Goals that read the following:

• 36 blog posts
• 24 short videos
• 36 emails

I’m so forgiving with my goal setting because I couldn’t possibly have foreseen that I’d discover Atomic Essays and the brilliant philosophy of publication behind them.

So I couldn’t have known that publishing blog posts would feel almost irrelevant once I found such an exciting new avenue to explore.

That said, here’s how many blog posts I did publish:

• 6 blog posts, or 13,601 words

Here’s how many atomic essays (as of writing this on Dec 4th) I published.

• 142!

At an average of 300 words per, that’s roughly 42,600 words!

For a grand total of 56,201 words published this year! Insane, and I haven’t even gotten started.

(Edit: I counted the words published and my estimate was off by almost 20k. The true number is 71,822

Getting into video finally happened this year. I let the cat out of the cage and downloaded TikTok. Don’t worry, there’s no cringy dance videos on the horizon.

I intended to release

• 24 short videos

And released

• 71!

I put them all on TikTok, with a few going up to YouTube as Shorts, and Instagram as Reels too. This republishing thing is super laborious and I’ll keep improving workflow bit by bit so that all platforms are given love.

I only started TikTok earlier this year, in April, and already have:

• 489 followers!

This whole part of the pipeline is still pretty uncomfortable, as I’ve got huge gaps in my skillset that I’m learning to cover one brick at a time.

Leaving the last and most important numbers: email.

I aimed to write and release:

• 36 emails

And I have drafts written for:

• 5 emails

So you can see priorities on paper didn’t quite match up with priorities in real life, for a number of reasons.

Time, energy, expectation management, all of it played a part.

I estimate very loosely that I’ve spent 200 hours on production alone this year. Not a very high number really! Considering what a huge amount of output it’s been. But, that comes out to about 275 words per hour. Given that I will have spent roughly 10x that earning the money to pay for my bills I think it’s pretty impressive how much I’ve gotten done with so little time invested.

I do treat my time as a resource. I started tracking it a few months ago, around September, so I’m excited to be able to actually present real data about how I’ve spent my hours over a whole year come December 2023!

Goals for 2023

For the coming year I’m feeling good. I’ve built a solid body of work and feel I can easily create content every day for the rest of my life, if only I can figure out all the other life stuff for example around you know, paying bills.

Goal setting is a fickle art.

The goal has to be inspiring and motivating. Too big and it becomes frightening, I am paralysed. Too small and I’m not excited to achieve it, it doesn’t move me.

I’ve found it incredibly helpful to pick goals of process, goals of daily movement, rather than outcome. The better a process becomes a goal post, the better it moves me into action. That said, I think I’ve matured.

I believe it’s time I set some outcome goals for the direction of this brand, and really put a target on my back in doing so.

In 2023 I will publish:

• 52 Emails
• 1 Notion Template
• 1 Convo Breakdown
• 1 Microskills Worksheet
• 104 Atomic Essays
• 156 Videos
• 6 Blog Posts

Another reason for all this (I feel SO SELF CONSCIOUS about how self indulgent this post is).

Posting these things in public, putting it out there for the world to judge, criticise, etc.

I upload this as a way to hold myself to account. For 12 months from now you’ll be reading these words Said, and someone out there in the world will have read them too.

So how did you do? Have you done our future proud? Have you done our audience proud? Have you served at the highest level?

Here’s your bar to measure against.

In 2023 I will grow:

• My email list to 100 subscribers
• My TikTok account to 2,000 followers

Conclusion

It’s been a big year!

Kind of fitting I guess, that this review should be the biggest yet. It feels like it’s been the biggest year yet!

Next time I’d like to maybe do a cute presentation, have some slides even? Make a YouTube video out of it? Could make some like, pie charts…

Anyway, THANK YOU for reading my goodness. Thank you for indulging me. Thank you for holding hope, for believing society can be more than it is, for recognising that it starts inside each and every one of us.

Thank you for reading so far and coming along on this journey with me. I hope it inspires you to dream a little bigger, to plan a little more clearly, to reach a little further.

Thank you above all…

For your COURAGE.