How We Start

Happy New Year, everyone! As Barry Manilow sang, “Looks like we made it!”

Now we’re in the first day of the new year. 2021 stretches out before us like a brand new journal: Pages clean and waiting for your pen to touch down, its spine uncracked.

We’re all trying to put 2020 behind us, at least the bad parts. Because those bad parts were extraordinarily bad. But there were also a lot of lessons learned and, hopefully, a lot of growth that accompanied that learning. One of the things that should be clear: So much of what happens is beyond our control.

While I’m not an adherent to Stoic philosophy–I can’t say that I’ve studied the writings of Marcus Aurelius or Seneca to any depth–I subscribe to a newsletter called The Daily Stoic. Today’s post was particularly useful. Looking back on 2020, Ryan Holiday, the post’s author, writes:

Nobody was expecting a pandemic. Nobody was expecting wildfires. Or so much of what happened. But the people who had a solid January and February were in a better position than those who had delayed and procrastinated, who had not taken the beginning of the year seriously. What is put off until next week is more vulnerable to what may happen today or tomorrow. 

So how should we approach this new year? Holiday writes:

All we control are the beginnings of things. We control how we start. We control our first move. Whether we say hello to a pretty stranger, but not whether they reciprocate. We can make the pitch, or the apology, but fortune controls whether it’s accepted. We can plan the trip, but not when or if we arrive. We control this first minute of the long year ahead.

This is a really healthy approach: Know that the scope of what you can actually control is small. Given that, making sure we take our best, first step every time is the most important thing we can do.

2021, let’s go!