A yearly theme for 2025

Tired: New Year's Resolutions
Wired: Yearly Themes

I don't know if Myke Hurley and CGP Grey of the "Cortex" podcast were the guys who invented the idea of a yearly theme but they were the guys I was listening to when I first heard about the idea.¹

I flirted with the idea a couple of times since then but nothing ever stuck. This year however, given how unruly 2024 felt, I decided to go all-in on doing a theme for the year to really help guide what I will be doing and how I'll be doing it.

What's a yearly theme? From the guys themselves:

A Yearly Theme is a word or phrase that represents what you’d like more of in your life, or the direction in which you’d like to go.

A good Theme is broad and acts as a guide, rather than a specific or numerical outcome.

Coming up with my own theme word

OK so knowing all of that my goal last week was to spend time really thinking about what my own theme was going to be.² It needed to cover the following areas:

1. Getting back to basics for health and wellness. We're talking simple things like getting back to walking and starting some strength exercises, getting a lot better about what I'm eating, etc.
2. Stopping the endless experiments with tools, settling on a handful of them to get my work done, and getting on with the actual work.
3. Getting back to hobbies and things I enjoyed in the past which have fallen by the wayside: reading actual books, getting out into nature, gardening, etc.
4. Coming up with a set of routines. I thought about how much I get stressed when I keep having to do things on the fly, responding to whatever is happening like everything is a fire. Some people thrive in those situations but I do my best at work and in my personal life when I can stick as much as possible to a routine and a schedule.

The theme word: "grounded"

Ultimately what I want out of myself is resilience but being resilient is impossible when you don't feel a sense of place or purpose. Given all of that my theme word for the year is "grounded". In order to thrive I need to do the things I mentioned above; they will ground me and let me start actually living my life again (vs. "letting life live me").

It's been a good starting point. I have my tools ready. I've got some initial routines worked out that I'll tweak over time as I see whether they work or not. Grounded is the state I need to be in to be intentional about the choices I make and the things I do. What I had been doing wasn't working, has cost me greatly both in physical and mental health, and in no way was how I think of the meaning of the word "resilience" on a personal level. It's time to take all of that back.

1. As an aside I started listening to Cortex when the first episode came out. In episode 1 Grey only had agreed to 10 episodes at the time. Here we are almost at the 10th anniversary of the podcast which started 6/3/2015. ↩︎
2. And for those that care about the details I spent a lot of time talking to Google Gemini on my phone in chat mode to mull all of this stuff over in multiple sessions. It was another great example of a good use of the technology. There are a lot of AI haters out there who think the technology isn't good for anything. I disagree completely. It's not going to solve every problem, and it's terrible at some at the moment, but when it works it feels like magic. ↩︎