Welcome to 2023. The year that I make drastic and tangible changes to my path the the life I want to live. It all start here, with writing and commiting my thoughts and actions to the digital medium. In preperation for the new year I watched CGP Grey’s excellent video on themes.

The idea is that new year resolutions don’t lead to sustainable change. Motivation wavers and faulters when the resolution is challenged or broken. Instead a theme is an idea on how to approach the year. The short of it is that instead of making the goal I want to lose x weight create the theme Year of Health and commit to taking actions that improve your health. As long as you take actions that feel like it’s moving you towards your theme, then the exact data points don’t matter. In CGP Grey’s example if you commit to a year of health which starts out with you exercising but ends up with you needing to take care of a major medical issue that puts you out of commission for a bit, you still made it because you took care of your health, which was the theme.

Here is a list of themes CPG Grey mentions in the video:

  • Adventure
  • Attention
  • Clarity
  • Compassion
  • Completion
  • Consistency
  • Discipline
  • Gratitude
  • Growth
  • Health
  • Home
  • Joy
  • Learning
  • Poise
  • Routine
  • Simplicity
  • Structure
  • Transition

Lots of these words resonated with me, especially Attention, Structure, Growth, Poise, Simplicity, Consistency, Routine, and Discipline.

The technique of themes is based on systems thinking. In systems thinking the functional description is an abstract and high level concept describing the problem. Before describing solutions we must first explore the problem problem space. Life is with complexity and we often don’t have the full picture or grasp of of what is going on. The benefits of a systems approach is about managing real world changing issues and producing the best solutions (in terms of efficiency, economics, robustness, etc.) to the need being addressed.

I really appreciated CPG Grey’s thoughts on this topic and I look forward to I writing more in later posts about my thoughts and views on systems thinking. As CPG Grey suggests, I have decided to go with seasons of themes that fit into an overall year, I feel more urgency than the changing of the annual calendar. I think that this will be my Winter of Intent in the Year of Discipline. More on that later.