My 2024 Year In Review

Learning of the year

Whether we want it or not, feeling resistance is an elemental part of the journey. In 2019, author Steven Pressfield shared in the podcast Super Soul Sunday that the key thing about resistance is that it comes second. He says, ‘what happens first is the dream, and the resistance is the shadow. Meaning that for every dream there is automatically going to come resistance. You don’t have to blame yourself for it.’ ¹

I believe overcoming resistance is a skill that everyone can practice. It’s valuable because opportunities not only quietly show up and pass by; they don’t force themselves on us either. The real skill for me is recognizing these opportunities and having the courage to seize them, especially when resistance is present.

And I need to find a way to embrace it every now and then too — reminding myself to take action even before I feel completely ready, especially when I’m about to do something I haven’t done before. For example, when I launched The Tiny Bits newsletter, I knew that the challenge to stand out in people’s inboxes was going to be a tough one. With all of the emails entering my inbox daily, I knew that I had to find a way to get the word out.

So in the first month, I reached out to 65 newsletter owners, directories, thought leaders, people I know, and people that I barely know or do not know at all. I told them what I genuinely appreciated about their newsletter and shared where I was heading with mine, asking if they had any best practices they could share with me and if there was a chance they could pass it on to their network if they saw any value in it. Note here that at the time I had only published a few newsletters, and there were only a handful of subscribers.

In the end, I got listed in 22 of them, which was only half of the people I reached out to. Still, I considered the response wonderful and was actually quite happy with it. Despite the effort of writing to 65 people, I gained valuable insights and connected with some great individuals.

Then I decided to reach out to every single one of them that didn’t introduce the newsletter to their audience asking if they could provide me some feedback on what the newsletter needed so that they were willing to share it. Some of them took the time to reply, others didn’t. But those who did reply ended up providing me valuable keynotes that actually helped me to create a better product.

In other words, whether the newsletter was according to their taste or not, I realized that I created a situation in which there was only something to gain. One way or the other, the newsletter was going to be introduced to a new audience of readers, or I would receive feedback that could help me improve the product.

It’s true that the newsletter probably needed more thought, effort, and time. At the same time, thinking that something needs to be finished before making people part of your project only leads to passivity. I’m well aware that the writing will always need ongoing refinement. It will never be fully finished, and thinking that it needs to be puts you in a station of inaction.

In fact, there were a lot of people who had already walked down my path and gained insights that I could learn from. Their feedback was free for me to access, but the most important reminder is to also give yourself permission to just go out into the world and do it. It’s a liberating experience, I’ve found, to direct your own thinking toward questions like: What is it that I can do, and how can I use what I actually know to get from A to B?

Being able to recognize opportunities puts you, most likely, in a more proactive state of mind.