DAY ONE

January 1st, 2020

People seem to be of different minds when it comes to New Years.  Many see it as a time of reflection in order to reorient and redirect. Others rant about how the calendar is a fiction.  Others love to point out that gyms will be packed for a couple weeks and then they will empty out again for the rest of the year. 

Those with serious dedication to their habits and the practice of their values often scoff about this phenomenon, and for good reason,

every day is a new chance, a new opportunity to change direction.  Why wait for one specific day of the year to give something a good shot?

Tinkered Thinking which is 626 episodes strong started on a random Monday in April of 2018 and this fact is so superficial that I actually had to look it up…

But one underlying fact that seems to fly under the radar with regards to all these considerations about the new year is the fact that people actually get some free time that is casually devoted by culture to reflection and planning for a better future.

Compare that fact to something Bill Gates does: he takes off whole weeks in order to just… think.

How many other people have this sort of luxury?  For those working your 9-5 hustle, these virtually never happen since vacation time is often allocated to busy vacations to stave off the feeling that life is somehow being wasted.

Only those who are independently wealthy can afford something like a ‘Think Week’, let alone multiple Think Weeks during the year.

This variable of time is the most overlooked variable when it comes to innovation in any area, whether it be personal development or product development.  Culturally, it evokes a certain nervousness to simply… do nothing.

This is a secret for creative people.  They schedule time in order to explore, and in the beginning this often means doing… nothing.  Once some sort of process of creation takes root and it’s consistently productive, it’s hard to see that creative period as ‘doing nothing’ because so much ends up happening.  What’s important to focus on is the actual time allotted to such.

What if, for example everyone had a random day off during the week that functioned like New Years Eve.  It was a time totally detached from normal life and work that was casually allocated to just think about the direction of one’s own life. 

How would this affect people?

Impossible to know.

Unless of course , you try it out for yourself.