Myopia: Jan 2022 in review

Noah Kagan recently shared on My First Million that he sends a review of his life to a small group of email contacts at the end of every month. I was thinking, I would do that right as Sam Paar was saying he would love to read someone posting about their month in review. He definitely didn’t mean me, but too late– the deal was done. Here begins my review of myopically important events over the past month.

Damn, 2022 started off strong. I was spending the non-holidays with a Muslim family who doesn’t even operate on the Gregorian calendar, and they were all asleep already in the Hilton in Cappadocia, Turkey when 2022 was born. I was deep in conversation with someone who, not too many years ago, was far and away the most important person in my life. We were dusting off stories that we’d set aside, forgotten. Things long enough past that they no longer felt like part of my definition of self, but near enough that they were still tender to the touch. Things I’d forgotten needed healing, things that had been out of sight in my rearview mirror but were still in the back seat. I was equally grateful to overwrite my last memories of him. The strongest person I knew so doubled over in pain that he had developed tics and a permanent twist of agony in his face. Because of me. Now, years later, finally living his heart’s desire. Basking in the glow of his own family, safe from Talib vagaries. I soaked up the mental images of that wide smile and noted the last subtle tic that had decidedly converted into a character trait. I knew I was one of the few people who remembered him without it. The life updates came easily because the backstories as ingrained in memory as nursery rhymes. I forgot how well he knew me. Despite the years, I felt like I still knew him best. And the changes were impressive. We’d both worked on ourselves, our goals, in drastically different directions but with similar degrees of success. I’ve logically known for a long time that closure and integration are essential to moving forward, but never have I had such a clear experiential example in my own two hands.

And that was just January 1.

A chance encounter in what seemed to be an empty bar in an empty coastal tourist village the Tuesday after New Year’s brought spontaneity back into my life that had been absent since at least September, and I missed that feeling as I headed back to Istanbul, back to France, back to my regular routine. We’ve stayed in touch.

The French border authorities gave me a tiny taste of the life of immigrants and refugees when I was denied boarding to my flight home from Turkey. It took hours to even understand the problem, get someone to talk to me, find what had become of my booking and my luggage, escort me backward out of the airport to purchase yet another flight, yet another train ticket, yet another hotel stay. The following day, that middle seat shone golden. I was flooded with immense gratitude to be granted any space at all, and I didn’t dare say everything was OK until I was within walking distance of my apartment.

Months of recruiting and training a new assistant at work became for naught when she abruptly abandoned ship at the end of December. My mid January, I was feeling grateful she’d left. The recognition that assistants come and go had pushed me to systematically document every step of every task in videos as I recruited yet again, and what a gem of a new assistant I found. Similar success using the same approach to identify a second copyeditor for our team. New beginnings that made me smile on the old beginnings end.

I was over the moon to start my long-anticipated Akimbo Marketing Course on Jan 24. I spent the day marauding around the platform, posting, reading, adding myriad meetups and calls to my calendar. As I sign out of the orientation session I see a missed call on my phone. What a game changer–an request from a new client for my company to provide a long term full time project manager to a high-profile sustainable energy initiative. Of course I said yes, and the adrenaline kept me awake nearly all night. All indicators pointed toward the fact that I should implement this project myself. Yet I hadn’t been implementing for over a year, and managing our current client portfolio took all my time. And I’d just started an intensive 6 month course! I would have to withdraw. And who would be able to manage our existing clients? How to pass off those longstanding relationships? What if no one wanted to do it? How would I train them? How would the team take it?

My Dynamite Circle Mastermind came to my rescue. Talking through it with them helped me see and articulate the many ways my taking the project would benefit the whole team, would warp-speed us in the direction we intended to go anyway, would push us to implement in a few weeks what we might have done gradually over a couple years. I called a colleague who I thought was a great fit to take over our current client management and she was on board. I called an all-team meeting and pitched the idea. It was a hit. And over the next week I cranked out every remaining bit of tacit knowledge I had about managing our clients and posted it for all the team to see. I moved a few remaining top-level organizational items into a private folder and opened up everything else. I started introducing their new contact to clients over email. And then I stepped back and let go.