Some downtime at home through the Christmas break and subsequent ‘cold snap’ gave me a welcome opportunity to catch up on all of the things I hadn’t made time for throughout a busy autumn and start to winter. I’ve been cataloguing Pez and other collections (learn more here), catching up on comics, saved articles, TV shows, my YouTube ‘Watch Later’ playlist (in some cases, much later).
It’s all part of a reset, recharge and reboot process I need to go through to start again with the blank canvas of a new year.
A couple of weeks into this hibernation, I happened upon a blog entry from this month in 2007 titled ‘January is the life and death of optimism’. It may sound a little melodramatic for a 19 year old, though not entirely out of character with who I was then (or now, if I’m honest).
At this point in my life I was between college and University (although I didn’t know the latter would happen yet), I’d just quit a full-time retail job and had no idea what I was going to do next. It was the blankest of blank canvases I’ve ever been faced with. I can understand why I might have gone with the title I did.
Although my life has a little more certainty 17 years later, the basic mental struggle of a new year remains true. Fortunately I’ve learnt, time and time over, that the answer is small victories. Getting into a good routine, chipping away at the work to be done, rather than attempting to complete everything outright.
I like this from Jim Adkins of the band Jimmy Eat World, revealing the inspiration behind their song Diamond.
“My cycles of motivation usually start off with some kind of commitment to myself in a list-form. I’m going to organize. I’m going to plan. I’m going to buy a real calendar and put giant sharpie marks on actual dates. Yeah!
Most of the time that’s where my cycle of motivation stops. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
My current working idea is that I have a problem being satisfied with smaller, incremental change. I have a hard time celebrating the small victories. And that prevents me from reaching a goal.
I have to accept all there is, is progress over time. It’s not something you hear often because “This book will change your life … over the next 5 years!” … isn’t exactly a hot sell.” – Jim Adkins
“Right now I feel like I could take on the whole Empire myself”
After some deliberation I’ve decided on Substack to house my Collect Us All! writing project. I’m still not entirely convinced I’ve made the right choice, history would suggest that I’ll end up moving again at some point down the line.
One of my favourite all-round creatives, Joseph Scrimshaw, articulates the issue at play well in his newsletter Finish Your Monsters, likening our current internet run-around to the Rebel Alliance being pursued by the Galactic Empire.
“Like many people, I’m hoping to build a stable way to connect with friends, fans, supporters, strangers, etc as various social media sites implode, expand, collapse, and otherwise do things celestial objects do but in a far more depressing way.
When I was young, I was thrilled by the snow battle on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. As an adult, the truth behind the battle makes me sigh.
The rebellion had just got their new base set up. They weren’t even doing their real work of fighting the Empire, just all the intensive groundwork so they could try to get their real work done. They were almost at the end of infrastructure week. Then, WHAM. The Empire arrives and knocks it all down and they’re chased to another system, another base, another long and lonely infrastructure nightmare.
The snow battle on Hoth is a rich zealot buying a social media site. It’s a lie that we all need to pivot to video. It’s a blog hosting site shrugging their shoulders about coddling hate-mongers. And, once again, we all have to load our escape shuttles, fire an ion cannon, and rebuild.” – Joseph Scrimshaw
When I started sharing articles on LinkedIn that were less business focused per se, I was doing so at a time when the “this isn’t Facebook” brigade were shouting their mouths off, while thought leaders were treading water, recycling ideas, waiting for the R.N-AI lifeboat to save them (it arrived prompt-ly, 4 months later).
It felt like a small act of rebellion to be writing about pizza and music festivals, boycotting Amazon and, perhaps my strangest moment, paying homage to the cultural legacy of You’ve Been Framed.
Weekly sea swimmer John Jocham remarked at how, when attending trade shows, people would approach him about his cold Friday morning dips, before enquiring about his area of expertise, wire and cable. The same was happening to me. On multiple occasions people were pulling me up on my references to the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers as if I’d granted them chance to breach a networking small-talk taboo.
Is it too late to say ‘happy new year’?
With this first post of 2024, I begin my third calendar year of keeping a regular blog again.
Last year it became a space to document our experience as a company, following Grapevine‘s move to employee ownership in March 2023. I credit Alan Braithwaite with encouraging me to keep a record of it.
That’ll continue here this year, particularly as our new financial year gets into full swing from the beginning of February. This month has been about all the things that go into the transition from one financial year to the next. For me, in my role, the key responsibilities are helping to develop our strategy for the coming year and considering the ways to best communicate this internally.
With the cultural shift of employee ownership, we’re looking to do the ‘communicating’ part differently to how we have previously. In my 8 or so years with Grapevine I’ve just about exhausted every possible way of detailing our strategy to the wider company in PDF slides format. We’re going to be brave this year and present it, to everyone, at an off-site event prior to our winter social in February.
This may seem a bit obvious, and “the done thing” for some. For us, it’s unchartered territory, but feels like the right thing to do now that everyone in the company is responsible for, and benefits even more greatly, from the delivery and results of our business strategy.
I shared previously about the advice I received from Arabella Lewis-Smith when we first became an EOT, to find ways to demonstrate that we’re doing things differently, in order to build buy-in from colleagues. My proposal to communicate the strategy in this new way is me continuing to follow that guidance.
To ensure we got the ‘development’ part right, I made the decision toward the end of December that I’d have to take a step back from event attendance and some of the other activities that characterised the latter half of 2023 for me. It was the right thing to do, even if it’s created a stark contrast between the end of one year and beginning of the next.
Instead, the events came to us, with Lindsay Spencer and Pauline Vines from Evelyn Partners providing a fantastic workshop on financial wellbeing for our team earlier this month at Grapevine HQ in Poole. Thank you to community champions Claire Main and Shelley Collins-Trevett for their role in helping to facilitate this training.
Fittingly, my first event of the year is scheduled for tomorrow. Looking forward to catching up with people I’ve missed seeing in recent weeks.
Liam Toms 