2024: Goodbye To All That

That’s another one done. It’s been a year.

This year my colleagues and work have been a help and a haven. I lost my Mum and learned new things about myself amongst the aftershock. It’s made me think about how the personal and professional relate to one another, about where value comes from and how to stay attached to what matters.

We all have extrinsic motivations: recognition, fame, money. By definition these are outside our control so best thought of as outcomes. This year I’ve thought a lot about the intrinsic things, the things that make me ‘me’, no matter what.

Find and cherish your thing

If you’re lucky, like me, your work and your passions intersect. For me that’s curiosity and culture - which is fortunate for a strategy bloke in creative agencies.

On one level that’s what I do - researching down rabbit holes, bouncing off creatives. Deeper down it’s about doing something that actually works with my ADHD brain - nerdy hyper focus and spontaneous lateral thinking.

In short I’m happy when I can be me and I’ve spent the year embracing and maximising those parts - while finding ways to accommodate the things I find challenging (basically anything involving my brain’s sloppy executive function).

It seems obvious. It isn’t always.

Try other people’s shoes

We all have our reasons, our anxieties, our unresolvable tensions. Work is a continuous negotiation between your needs and those of others. You can’t pick your way through it if you only have an idea of your needs and no idea about the needs of others.

Start with the assumption that other people mean well too and you won’t go too far wrong. It shouldn’t require superhuman levels of empathy to see the other side but sometimes it feels like that.

Breathe.

Be a generous colleague

When I started in agency world I was baffled, intimidated and tripped up by the language and rituals of workplace culture. Coming from a working class background I had no idea these jobs existed, had no sense of the kind of behaviours that seemed to come naturally to everyone else.

As I’ve advanced and grown I can honestly say the best investment I’ve made is the time I spend listening and talking to junior colleagues.

You can call it advice or mentoring if you want to be formal but it comes down to being generous with what you’ve learnt. There’s nothing quite like feeling you’ve helped someone feel a bit more confident or helped them join the dots.

So 2024, despite what you’ve thrown at me that’s where I am. Life and work can be hard. If I’m doing these three things I’m alright.

I hope the rest of you are too.

Love & peace

John x