Day 24,354:  Learning How To Approach the Decade Ahead From The Decade Past 

For me, preparing for the new decade became a look back at the old one. I started cleaning my work space at home.

The first notebook to get dusted off dated back to 2009 and my freelancing days. It was when I first became a webinar aficionado, sometimes enrolling in webinars daily on various technical marketing topics in order to keep myself up-to-date. The spiral was filled with scribblings on Facebook, Twitter, SEO, Hootsuite, Lead Generation marketing and marketing oneself better in a competitive world. For some reason, I always felt the need to keep copious notes should I need to reference the information for speeches, seminars or client meetings. They were my student notebooks in a self-study course on anything I felt I might need to stay current in my field.

Interestingly at the same time that nothing has changed much, many things have changed. I still work in the world of Facebook, Twitter, SEO, and Hootsuite. Many of my gurus of 2009 – Seth Godin, Michael Stelzner – remain key resources for me today. I also still enroll in far too many webinars on topics of choice in this crazy field of marketing. However, much of what I wrote down in 2009 is now either ingrained in me, so the notes aren’t needed anymore, or the data is dated, so not worth keeping. None of it is irrelevant, but likewise not relevant enough to keep, so it got recycled.

Since 2009, I stopped freelancing. I went back to a full time job with the media. I moved to South Jersey. I got laid off, and ended up working in the Transportation/Travel Industry in Cape May and now Delaware. I could not have imagined that I’d have a house down the shore, much less a city pad in Philadelphia. I was solidly a North Jersey girl with a North Jersey network.

The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you have come. Bangtan Boys, Butterfly May 2018

What I’ve learned is that I have no idea what the next 10 years may bring. I had no idea what the past 10 years would be. It was, as Vizzini says in The Princess Bride, “Inconceivable.”

Ageless Aging 

Today, CBS’s Sunday Morning did its annual program honoring all who had passed away since January 2019. A surprising number of them lived well past 100. One had died in his fifties, and clearly left this earth too young. If more of us will now live to 100 – and we will – we have decades ahead to do something yet not done, and likely not yet conceived.

It’s hard to think of what to do next at any stage in life. I’m starting this new decade by revisiting some things I had done before, but let go fallow. Blogging is one of them. I’ve had a full year off. A new decade, a new computer, a new standing desk in a new work space all seem like a good enough pokes to get back at it. I’ll face all the same challenges I had both a decade and a year ago — where to carve out the time, what to find inspiring, how to do it in a way that makes sense.  However, I also know that when I stop something, I forget all too quickly the mechanics of how to get it done. It’s not like riding a bike, and I can’t always remember the shortcuts to make a project easier. But, it seems I may have a few decades ahead yet to figure it out again, so it’s as good a time as any to restart.