"Focus, you fuck!"
-- AvE
It is that time of the year again for gyms to undergo expensive renovations fueled by the sudden cash influx caused by three months of "I'm gonna get fit this year" donations.
TL;DR
My yearly theme for 2025 - The Year of Focus.
What's a "Yearly Theme"?
Given that it's already 2025—holy fuck!—I'm assuming some of you might be familiar with the "yearly theme" concept, but in case you're not - it is a term I first heard from CGPGrey and it goes as follows:
"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. Most importantly – a good theme can’t fail. A broad theme allows you to change. For example, in The Year of Reading, you may start by reading books and ultimately spend more time reading interesting academic papers – and that’s okay. If, however, you had set a resolution to “Read 50 books this year”, spending time reading academic journals would have been considered a failure."
Another way to look at this (yes, let me get all philosophical for just one fucking minute) would be through the eyes of stoicism, and specifically the dichotomy of control. For me, this is one of the core Stoic principles that I strive to follow at all times.
What we as mere mortals can control are our thoughts, our actions and our emotions, while the outcome is completely out of our control (along with other things, but this is unrelated to my point).
Let's take the "I'm gonna get fucking fit!" goal as an example - yes, you can go to the gym every single day, spend your entire income on supplements, read all the guides and consume all the snake oil on the planet and still not get fit, because as you now understand, the outcome is not something you can control. Instead of setting arbitrary (and perhaps unattainable) goals like "I'll lose 20 kilograms" or "I'll read 20 books", focus on making an effort, no matter how small or large, and learn from your progress.
Hence, when setting up your yearly theme, don't focus on WHAT you want to achieve, instead focus on who you want to become or how you want to improve during this time period.
While specific goals can be useful tools, I guess I'll be that uncle and remind you, in accordance with Stoicism, that tying your happiness to achieving your goals (or your unhappiness with missing them) sets you up for disappointment either way. Instead, focus on what you can control—your consistent effort and how you respond to challenges.
Yes, I'm done. No, I'm not fuckin' sorry.
Last Year's Theme
Last year (which was my first foray into yearly themes), I didn't publicly write about my chosen theme, but here's the excerpt from my KMS:
The theme for year 2024 shall be: The year of decluttering and organization.
And while the end of 2023 (and the beginning of 2024) reminded me that the universe does not give a shit about my plans, I think I did fairly well to stick to the theme, which ended up being more akin to "The Year of Decluttering, Organization and Restabilizing".
This Year's Theme
For 2025, my goal is a bit different. I already started working out (having lost almost 12 kilograms since Jan 2024), I resumed work on Hajime and Boku, and I am doing well at my actual job.
So instead of focusing on a single aspect of my life, I am going to follow suit to last year's theme. The theme for 2025 is - "The Year of Focus".
"What the fuck is 'The Year of Focus'?"
-- You, probably.
I shall explain. Initially, I thought of "The Year of Schedule/ing" as I wanted to make sure I schedule time to work, read and learn the things I care about (not forgetting travel and leisure, of course).
Then I figured that scheduling, while an important and useful tool, is not how this should be handled, and this is where I kind of combined last year's organization effort together with this year's ultimate goal - "make sure I have time to focus on things I care about, one thing at a time", (which, you have to agree, doesn't make for a good yearly theme title).
The "how" is not yet fully formed, as some things (like working out) are scheduled, while for others I will have to counter-act my dumbass, "oh look a squirrel" ADHD brain, e.g.:
- Focus on working on/learning one thing at a time.
- Offload other encountered items to my todo list or KMS, instead of getting sidetracked.
- Document my journey and knowledge.
Yearly themes feel like a more humane, flexible approach to personal growth. It’s only my second year doing this, but I already believe it’s a trend worth continuing. So go on—decide what matters to you, and let’s do this shit!"