I don’t really believe in New Years Resolutions, never have. They seem like a fun way to proclaim your frustrations with life at the moment and declare that “from now on, things are going to be different”. Never works.

So the fact that I’m starting to write a blog today strikes me as a bit ironic. The commitment to a journey of writing publicly, frequently & consistently, feels unrealistically overwhelming. I’ve tried once or twice before, what’s different this time? Honestly it’s hard to say, but my motivation feels very different and it’s been building for some time. I always viewed blogging as social media with an emphasis on the “media” and that it was 80% self-promotion, 10% keeping a diary and 10% other. That first 90% just never interested me and blogging meant forcing myself to write for reasons I didn’t believe in, which never lasted.

This last year has been one of the toughest of my life, across many dimensions. What I’ve learned through those struggles is that the “other” part of blogging feels very attractive, as it might be a very powerful way to grow both personally and professionally. There’s a bunch of reasons why I think this could be a good discipline to build, with improving my writing skills beyond just “get to the point” emails being only the beginning.

Firstly it’s a meditative place to find and express gratitude each day. This is perhaps my biggest reason to want to blog. Prioritizing some quiet time each day to think has been a hard habit to instill, so has consciously being mindful of things I am grateful for. The fact that it takes 30 min or so to put a blog post together and takes very conscious thought is going to be a good thing for my health. The more I’ve thought about 2013 through a lens of gratitude (which has been hard) the more my attitude to 2014 is shifting in a good way. Myself & those I care about can only benefit form that. I believe my biggest wins in 2014 are going to be personal wins, moving my life to new levels of emotional wisdom and courage.

Secondly it’s a place to put pebbles in the stream regarding my work. I work near the bleeding edge of tech, and have spent my career very much on the “what’s just around the corner” edge of the industry. Sometimes this has been fruitful, often it’s been a struggle. It’s always been interesting. Since moving to San Francisco and starting Dekko about 3 years ago I realized that even those of us living on the edge have vastly differing abilities to “see into the future” and all of our visions of the future are varyingly blurry and even if we’re looking in roughly the same direction some of us look at the next step while others have their heads in the clouds. It’s tempting as a CEO to see yourself as Legolass running towards your vision, dancing through the scenery, jumping over streams, feet barely touching the ground, racing towards the goal with the world right behind you (the reality is closer to a drunk partygoer “running” through the scrub to the next pub.. but I digress). The key point is that no matter what I think, I’m only a leader if I can turn around & see people following me. To do that I need to keep everyone on the same journey, with the same vision. I hope these posts can act like pebbles in the streams, slowly filling in the conceptual leaps I fly over, creating a path towards a new land.

Thirdly and deeply related to both the above themes… I want to have new conversations with people who are interested in what I’m interested in. I am viewing this blog as a way to put myself out there, with some conscious vulnerability, in the hope of finding others to grow together with. Yes I know this whole blogs as conversations thing is so 2003 and why haven’t I done it earlier etc? but I always felt it was a minor benefit, in the 10% other bucket. I now believe I was wrong about that and am testing the waters.

So, the journey has begun