In lieu of a New Year’s resolution I like to select a theme to help guide me over the coming year. A theme is kind of like a resolution in that it is an attempt to somehow be different (maybe even better!) than I currently am but it differs in that it lacks the clarity or specificity of an actual goal.
This is by design since the downfall of my previous attempts at picking and sticking to a New Year’s resolution always seemed to hinge on the fact that what seemed urgent and important on December 31st lost its potency by the middle of summer (if it was lucky to last even that long). A year is a long time to focus on one specific personal improvement intention so I’ve experimented with a shift to a yearly theme over the past few years.
The nice thing about a theme is that it’s broad enough to apply in many different situations. If done right, it acts as a filter that all your decisions and experiences go through. It’s like wearing sunglasses all the time — your eyes are protected by the dark glass and eventually you just kind of forget they’re there. I mean, your theme shouldn’t fade entirely into subconsciousness but you don’t really want to be thinking about all day everyday, either. Instead, it just acts as a guardrail to help keep your decisions headed in a way that they may not go otherwise. And other times it’s like a helpful and cheerful parrot sitting on your shoulder and constantly asking, “Does this align with your theme? Does this align with your theme? Does this align with your theme?”
Anyway, enough about themes. They are good and you should pick one (or two).
Now, onto this year’s theme.
I’m not a very intense individual by nature (in most, but not all, things). I was a pretty good youth/teenage hockey player but looking back at my career with the benefit of hindsight I can see that I wasn’t really that intense (at least by elite hockey player standards). I wasn’t a particularly intense student. I was lucky to get by on natural talent in most things and could work hard when that wasn’t enough. But working hard isn’t intensity. Even now, in my work as an organization design consultant and writer I can see large swaths of my day-to-day work where I could benefit from doing what I’m currently doing… but in a slightly more intense way.
Over the past few months I’ve been trying to notice when I find myself intrigued or repelled by somebody in a social or professional setting. Almost universally I’ve realized the people I find the most interesting in most settings are intense about a thing (or at most, a couple things). When you talk about the thing with them you see them find another gear. They scoot to the edge of their seat or set their drink down so they can more move their hands around with greater theatrics or they start drawing things on scraps of paper — you get it.
You might think the opposite of this would be people who are super calm and chill all the time. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think the opposite of the intense person is the person who just doesn’t care about much of anything. No strong opinions. Somebody who couldn’t talk your ear off about a thing (even if they think you’d think the thing is boring — I love when people have obsessions over weird stuff).
Just to be clear, on this continuum of INTENSE to MILQUETOAST I think I fall more toward the intense end than the bland end. Anybody who has gotten me going about GTD or the Detroit Red Wings or org design or whatever sci-fi book I happen to be reading at the time know that I can pour on the intensity from time-to-time. There’s something about the last couple years, though, that make me want to take this dedication to intensity more seriously.
I think it may come from a sense of doing too many things at too mediocre of a level. I love being busy and I love new projects and I have a hard time telling anyone (especially me) no. It’s hard to be particularly intense about a few things if you have a ton of stuff going on, though. Looking at it through this lens, then, I realize that I want to try to say yes to fewer things and then do them with a newfound intensity.
But I also want to explore intensity in other parts of my life. How do I up the intensity in my relationships? What does it look like to be an intensely attentive partner? An intense son? What does it look like to bring intensity to a conversation with a stranger and a conversation with a lifelong friend? What topics would I want to broach, how would I want to show up emotionally, how can I be a better version of myself by turning up the intensity a little bit?
And what about my personal habits? What would a more intense commitment to health look like? More intensity with my writing? With meditation? With committing to simplicity and minimalism?
The nice thing about this theme is that I’m not really undertaking it as a grand effort of fundamentally changing myself as a person. I actually think I’m pretty great. I do work hard. I do care about people. I can be empathetic to a fault. I want to do the things I already do… but I just want to do them better.
But wait, there’s more.
I could wrap up this article right here and call it a day but I think I want to try something a little different this year. With a single word or concept yearly theme you can run the risk of over-indexing on it. I’m sure it doesn’t take too much imagination to see how I could potentially go off the rails with a yearly theme of “Intensity.” For that reason, and because I like the idea of a partially paradoxical yearly theme, I’m going to add another word — “Simplicity.”
Simplicity is about operating from first principles whenever possible, removing unnecessary distractions, and staying as close to the essence of the thing as possible. Intensity without simplicity could be disorganized. Intensity with simplicity is focused. Intensity without simplicity could have you chasing rabbit trails — intensely. Intensity with simplicity means doing the right thing consistently.
On the other hand, you can look at simplicity as being in opposition to intensity. A lot of times the simple thing is the easy thing and very rarely is the easy thing the intense thing. In my case, I think it will be helpful to filter my desire for intensity through a secondary lens of simplicity. I’ve already seen some very early positive returns that this dual focus can have. In the middle of December I decided that I was tired of seeing my yearly weight graph ever steadily going up and to the right. Like many folks at the end of the year I decided that 2020 was going to be a year where I took my fitness more seriously.
I had already been noodling on this Intensity/Simplicity theme for a little while at that time so my first impulse was to ask myself what it would look like to get intense about my fitness. All sorts of things started coming to mind — getting a trainer, finding the best gym, finding some sort of elaborate program to follow, etc. However, once I added simplicity to the equation I realized that I would be better served by directing my intensity into as simple a plan as possible (namely, eat more reasonable portions and run). I’m still being intense about it but I’m actually being intense about the right things rather than something ancillary like joining a dope gym or hiring a trainer.
I’m looking forward to navigating this creative tension throughout the year. Asking myself whether a given decision or situation is calling for my simplicity theme or my intensity theme — or perhaps a hybrid of both — is going to be a lot of fun.
What does your upcoming year look like? What’s your theme?
I’m Sam. I help make the future of work more human and adaptive at The Ready. I help humans take back their time and attention at The Deliberate.