The Unexamined Year Is Not Worth Living
With the start of 2023, many have set their New Year’s resolutions. They dream of what they might achieve during this coming year. Some will succeed; many will fail. The future is uncertain. What fruit this year will bear is still to be seen.
Unlike the future, the past is fixed. Since 2022 has already happened, the fruit is ready to harvest. All we have to do is to examine our year. Author and podcaster, Tim Ferris, has a great process for doing just this, called a Past Year Review. A Past Year Review leads us to prioritize the things that lead us to flourish and to be aware of those things that do not. I’ll share the steps in Tim’s own words:
Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 202[3]. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
As you look over your last year, I invite you to add one more step to this process. Note the significant experiences you’ve had, both positive and negative, and ask of each:
How did this experience shape who I am?
What did the experience mean to me at the time?
What meaning do I want to make of this experience going forward?
I once heard that Shakespeare was so reflective that he gained more wisdom from reading one book than most people do from a lifetime of reading. As with books, it can be easy to rush through our lives, not taking the time to ‘read’ well. I have a suspicion that one year of any human life is so full of wonders and mysteries, that even a lifetime would not be enough to exhaust its treasures. And yet we can be so busy living life and planning our futures, that we don’t notice the richness of what has already taken place.
This week, I invite you to set aside time to harvest some of the hidden fruit from your past.
God Bless,
Dan
