It’s the final chapter - the end of the calendar year. We’ve always found it a strange time for the year to end; it’s still the middle of winter and, in some parts of Canada, will remain wintry for months and months. It can be a bit hard to feel like you’re really turning a page in your life if you’re expecting all kinds of new things to begin on January 1.
However, if you can look at this time bridging the old and new years as “fallow time” - a time for slowing way down for contemplation, restoration, and reinvigoration - it might start to make some sense.
It’s been an intense 12 months of recovery.
You need some time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, what you’ll keep and what you’ll toss away as you enter into the new year. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be ready on the very first day of the year… or in the very first week.
While it may go against your primary focus on ACTION , you know as well as we do that there’s action that is incredibly effective and action that seems to be taking place for its own sake. The second kind is depressingly common, and it’s where bureaucracy can take hold, crushing your spirit.
The first kind of action - the effective one - is the kind that matters. It’s action that is meaningful. It’s action that is purposeful. It’s action that gets you where you want to go, with minimal resources, pain, cost, and effort, so you can live your life and run your business in the way YOU want.
It’s why so many of us became entrepreneurs in the first place.
This season, we recommend using this concept of ‘fallow time’ to stop doing for a little while. Gather your resources, have a look backwards, and contemplate what the future might hold. Sometimes, in order to fully understand the year we just lived through, we need to take time to breathe and rest.
The ground needs a resting season between new crops, and so do we. Perhaps there have been things that filled you with joy and esteem - things that made you feel energized and excited, ready to take on the world. Perhaps there were things that helped truck you along, yet you still felt kind of… blah. What can you keep and what can you let go? Is there another entrepreneur in your life who will get jazzed about the very things that made you feel blah? Maybe you can make a trade.
There are, of course those, things that didn’t work - the stuff that spontaneously combusted and threw you into a tailspin. It would be great to never, ever think of those things again. They’re over now, right? You solved them, and now you’re here, looking at the future. However, while history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it sure likes to rhyme. Why don’t we remove the possibility that the same thing - or something just like it, with a similar root cause - could ever occur again?
It’s those lessons that make powerful businesses. It’s the humility and the opportunity to learn that helps us become whatever the outside world deems “successful.” More importantly, it’s what helps you become what you define as successful.
Our 2021 theme of recovery was focused on doing exactly that: ripping apart what doesn’t work, identifying what does, and creating your business around what you really want out of life. We have been so excited to have guest posts from our friends Sandy Gunn, who gave us two articles on leadership - about responding to change and about responding to uncertainty - and Wendy Woloshyn, who walked us through the complexities of staffing and law.
We invite you to use your fallow time to re-read articles you saw earlier in the year, check out any you may have missed, and take some time for being still so you can make use of your learnings to create the next version of your business in 2022.
At Admin Slayer, our gut-check involves asking ourselves, “Are we having fun and making money?” If not, we need something to change. After some fallow time, we’ll be ready for digging in and seeing what’s growing next.
We wish you an amazing holiday season and a new year that brings you lots of fun, and lots of money.
