Thinking big this year: my 4 pointers
Hi there,
Not long ago, I was a guest on the Dutch podcast POM. That’s a podcast on media, culture, tech, and running a business, with Alexander Klöpping and Ernst-Jan Pfauth. (Dutch speakers can take a listen here.)
One of the things we talked about was making a plan for the year (starting at 21:55). Ernst-Jan asked me: How do you do that—come up with big, ambitious plans? How can we break out of our default way of thinking, which may be limiting in some ways?
Good question. And I didn’t really have a good answer at the time. If he asked me again today, I’d share these four pointers:
Take. Your. Time. You can sense whether your plans are really doing it for you or not. If not, then they need a bit more time to marinate. Put them aside and have another look in a few days.
Explore alternative aspects. There’s no set definition for big, bigger, biggest. And making an idea more exciting for yourself isn’t always about the numbers (how many people you want to reach out to or how many books you want to read). It often has more to do with context—who’s involved, the location, the form, or the content. So for instance: challenge yourself to read not necessarily more books this year, but books in a certain genre or only books written by women.
Shop around. Very rarely will you be trying something that’s never been done before. It pays to take the time to seek out similar stories and compare. Whenever I do this, I always discover new alternatives (or new to me, anyway).
Surround yourself with people who challenge you to take things a step further. We talk about this a little in the podcast, and it can sound somewhat cold—as if you’re upgrading your circle of friends or something. I mention it here because it can also mean simply knowing who in your social network actively contributes to your plans (instead of pointing out everything that could go wrong, for instance). Share your ideas with them.
You could also make it a point to expand your network, by starting a chat group on a shared interest or getting a book club going. My book club has been meeting on Zoom since the start of the pandemic and that works great. Make contact with interesting people you’ve lost touch with, or send a cold email to someone who impresses you. Invite them for a virtual coffee sometime and see what that brings.
Have a good week,
Rick
produced by the language girl