In 2013…

What are these days between Christmas and New Year for, except to look at our lives and dream of ways things could be different? It might not always be the season of miracles, but it does always seem to be the season of resolutions.

While I admit a bit of a love/hate relationship with making a wish-list of personal goals for the New Year, it is actually a practice that has worked for me, more often than not. Perhaps growing up in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas marked the end of the year and the start of a long summer holiday made January always feel like the month for rebooting one’s life.

2012 – The End Of The World

Late last year I laid out my big, somewhat audacious idea for 2012 in a post entitled Plans For The End Of The World. The joke was a somewhat lost on most readers (it had to do with one so-called Mayan Apocalypse), but there was a serious side to it as well. The kind of retreat from chasing work and diligently networking is seen by quite a few folks as creative and entrepreneurial suicide.

While, it has been a challenging and tough year in many ways, it’s also been fabulously inspiring, eye-opening and to use a rather hackneyed term, empowering. Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing a little more about what I learnt throughout the year and where I will be going, in a business and creative sense, in 2013.

After The End – Nothing

So, where do we go after the end of the world? Well, it seems like the only option left is to embrace nothingness, which is exactly what I intend to do in 2013. So my big, crazy, death or glory plan for the next year is this – buy nothing.

Now, obviously, I will buy food (and the things that go with sustaining modern life, like water, shelter, electricity and so on). What I really mean is, buy no gear.

No new cameras, or lenses, or guitars, or music hardware, or computers, or iDevices. No new plugins, or sample libraries, or software. In fact, I’m going to push it a little further, no books, no magazines (other than the ones I already have subscriptions for), no kitchen tools. I’m making do with what I have.

And, the honest truth is, I have amazing stuff. I’ve been fortunate in the last few years to pick some great creative gear. To be honest, some of it is so new I haven’t really mastered it yet. Which is part of what is driving this crazy plan. I want to make the most of what I have without adding to the pile.

I want to master the stuff I use, rather than just be chasing new stuff to make for my lack of mastery.

There Are Always Exceptions

Obviously, there are going to be a few exceptions. I’m going to give myself a pass for consumables, like guitar strings and anything that breaks and needs to be replaced during the year.

Catching Your Rhythm

These kinds of big, start the year anew moves work for me, because the rhythm of my life follows a similar two part pattern every year. I totally shut up shop over Christmas and New Year and I take a long break over mid-year summertime (having adapted to life in the Northern Hemisphere over the last 13 years).

But, not everyone is the same. I’d encourage you to figure out what the rhythm of your life is and find ways to take control in a pattern that works for you. My feeling is New Year’s Resolutions don’t work for a lot of people because the first of January doesn’t come during a time of natural change but rather, sits in between two otherwise normal working weeks.

Perhaps you might need to look to other holidays or festivals during the year as markers for beginning new plans. Or maybe, break things up into a different groove.

But, whatever, you do, I’d encourage you to dream big – heck, dream weird and crazy. It seems to me that the more life goes on, the more one needs to embrace dramatic change in order to just keep moving, let alone moving forward.