Happy New Year! Here's to a Fantastic 2025!
Dear Friends,
It is always weird when you write the new year a few times, in Scotland it is a tradition to wish people a Happy New Year when you first see them. This usually dies out around mid January usually followed by a brief greeting of how are you?
In the United Kingdom when you see someone, and they ask how are you it isn’t actually a question; you can simply grunt back. My understanding is that in other countries if you ask someone how they are when you are hurrying in the other direction in a corridor not waiting for answer this would be considered very rude – they are ready to tell you how they are. When people ask how are you? What should you say. A few years ago, I deliberately changed my automatic response to fantastic. It can have a surprisingly positive effect. I truly hope things are going well and will be fantastic for you throughout 2025.
YouTube Video of the Month https://youtu.be/fGzdHGFFWAk
I might salami slice this book summary into 12 shorts throughout the year, as I have done with January. This video is about working less and living more. Something many of us strive to do.
X of the Month https://x.com/Sandford_Police/status/1875192419588968954
Some good light hearted advice from Sandford Police (a parody account).
Although I hope things are going fantastic for you, but what do you do if things aren’t going well? My advice would be to reframe this as a challenge and as a test to your resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back and like any skill with practice you can achieve this. This also relates to the concept of robustness which is being able to form a plan. Together with resilience and robustness you will get through hard times!
It is New Year, so I feel obliged to mention it is a great time to optimise habits and use the compound effect to your advantage. Over time repetitive actions compound – this can be positive or negative so keep yours positive!
Website of the Month https://ideogram.ai/
If you want a cool AI image generating bit of software that actually can handle text try this out, as demonstrated (on my actual newsletter via Mailchimp sign up here for a monthly newsletter: https://chrisweatherburn.com/newsletter/)
All the best for 2025, let’s make it an awesome one!
Chris