Daniel’s Word for 2024

I've always loved making New Year resolutions. The date is arbitrary but the timing is perfect: a week spent consuming TV and leftover turkey, then a brief moment to reflect before the economy gets switched back on again. There really is no better moment to roll out the proverbial flip chart and evaluate life's priorities.

I'd guess that my resolution completion rate is somewhere around 50% – although this is more by accident than diligence. Most are forgotten by mid-February. A year is a long time to keep a goal front-of-mind.

So, as an alternative to resolutions, I now come up with a word for the year. One word for the whole year. That's it.

When this idea was first suggested to me, I chose the word elevate. I was fresh from dealing with a number of demoralising and distracting incidents. Instead of rising above them, I had got sucked into them. I took elevate into the following year to ensure that I didn't let that happen again. Having the word always to hand helped me stay on track and protect my own priorities.

My word for this year is faith, which, now I write it down, sounds like something a televangelist might say, but bear with me.

When I think about what I want to achieve in 2024, it seems almost impossible. There is so much to do, and many of the challenges have a lot of uncertainty attached to them. The biggest risk I face though is becoming overwhelmed and moving too slowly. Pausing at every challenge to ponder potential failure cases will all but guarantee the overall mission is not successful.

Taking a leap of faith is to acknowledge below-average odds, while simultaneously holding onto two counter-intuitive beliefs:

1. Acting with faith (e.g. engendering self-belief, and being open to a broad array of positive outcomes) improves the probability of success
2. Failure is still a step towards the greater goal (by means of acquiring insights from the failure, and by unbinding attention to work on another task)

Practically, this means: when I find myself deliberating about how to approach a problem, or experiencing imposter syndrome while working in a new area, or wondering how a feature launch will be perceived, I will think faith – faith in the process, faith in myself – and then just get on with it.