Happy Lunar New Year!

The Year of the Dragon

Did you know it’s the Year of the Dragon? This is a year that bestows good luck. Health, prosperity, and other similarly positive adjectives come with the Dragon. Smithsonian Magazine recently published an article talking about the luck afforded during the year of the Dragon and how it came to be if you’re interested in learning more.

I’m specifically thinking about this today because I used to live in a village in Taiwan and was very immersed in Lunar New Year celebrations. It’s been almost twenty years since I lived in Taiwan, and several years since I’ve traveled back to catch up with friends and my adopted family there. But I had an amazing call from Taiwan on Monday morning that reminded me about that part of myself, which I sometimes forget in the day to day of raising three kids, working, volunteering, and living a busy life here in Rhode Island.

Positive Belief

There are endless reasons to look positively or negatively at the world. One of the resounding things that I find is that belief transcends reality and will find validation, wherever it may be – out in the open or lurking in a dark corner. Having just passed into 2024, along with entering the Year of the Dragon, it seems to me like there is a vast amount of positivity to grab hold of if you wish to build momentum right now.

I think about momentum often. I’ve seen and reflected on how it’s played out in my own life over the years. Think about my example above, I moved to Taiwan as a fresh college graduate on a Fulbright scholarship, full of positive momentum. Then I got bogged down in wanting to control things and struggled immensely with finding ways to collaborate with my co-teachers, working not just across typical on-the-job obstacles and age gaps, but across a cultural bridge that I couldn’t see clearly and certainly didn’t understand well enough to navigate effectively. That pulled me into negative momentum. Though twenty years removed, this experience comes up often in my professional and personal experience because it taught me so much, including lessons I am still unpacking today.

Negative Momentum

Negativity happens to us all, and I find that it can be a good reminder for understanding balance and personifying the moments of positive change that we can affect. One of my best friends once coined a theory around my personal momentum, the “Theory of Ger-a-tivity,” which has always stuck with me because of how apt and transferable it is. As I remember it, we were sitting in my Southie apartment watching TV after a long weekend, the type of Sunday built for relaxing, ordering takeout, and basically doing nothing. I got up during commercial break, grabbed a hammer, and started ripping out my closet wall.

This had everything to do with momentum. While I was exhausted that Sunday from staying out too late at Shenanigans and would have loved to continue sitting, I had recently purchased my condo, renovated it extensively, and still had a few more projects in mind, including rebuilding the closet that was on the other side of the wall behind the TV. I couldn’t sit there watching without thinking about the next project that I had planned, and it drove me to get up and rebuild a closet on a perfectly good day for burning time.

Knowing Yourself: Theory of Ger-a-tivity

While thinking through the above earlier this week, I had a great chat with my manager where I referenced this little-known theory. I mentioned it to explain my decision-making process. Momentum is a hell of a thing and something that I recognize as vital to success. Having just finished my MBA last fall, I've been concerned about losing my momentum.

To provide context, the MBA is something I didn't think I could do. When I started, I was unemployed and needed to find a job. I was a new father, the third time over, that would have to balance a 6-month-old, a 5-year-old, and a 6-year-old. I'd tried and failed taking a self-paced single course on the Straighterline?during the Pandemic because it seemed like a bargain until it wasn't. There were numerous reasons why starting an MBA unemployed with three kids and mounting bills didn't make sense. Beyond any of those reasons, I was also afraid that I flat out couldn't do it, but I went forward, channeling something that I subconsciously embody to this day from my time in Taiwan: Ni bu yao xiang tai duo (Don't think too much).

Bu yao xiang tai duo

When I was living in Taiwan, people would say this to me constantly, and it made me grow paranoid. How did everyone know that I was thinking too much!? I was thinking and overthinking every little thing as I tried to make my way through my Taiwan experience, which is another example of something I didn't think I could do, until I did it - making it through the experience, not overthinking the experience, though I did succeed at both.

Over the years, I've found that I often have this visceral gut reaction of "I can't do this" when I'm taking on something new, whether it's speaking on stage, being a Cub Scout Den Leader, or leading the State of Smart Manufacturing Report. Luckily, these feelings are followed by "Ni bu yao xiang tai duo," knowing that if I just keep going, I might find that I can do this better than I dreamed.

Even writing these thoughts and thinking about how I felt at the start of many of these pursuits makes the pit of my stomach drop out a little. That stressful, beautiful feeling where you're about to do something that terrifies you a little bit, a feeling that unfurls a new dimension of the self that can make you more resilient - better, stronger, wiser, something - on the way to figuring out who you're not in the search of finding who you were meant to be all along.

Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about unbecoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place. - Paulo Coelho

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