Why not take more swings? You miss a 100% of the shots you don't take...

Happy New Year!

After a while, we had the chance to have a longer vacation and travel. It was wonderful spending time in India again after 5 years. We skipped a couple of years because we thought my daughter was still too young, and then there was this global pandemic….

I also disconnected much better than usual (didn’t open my laptop for ~2 weeks) and for some part of the vacation had time to just sit still and think - if you have young kids you’ll appreciate how rare this time actually is.

I enjoy making New Year resolutions. The randomness of the date aside - it’s a chance to reflect, rethink and plan.

One of the things I reflected on was that the last three years or so have been more unusual for me than the years before. There were a number of reasons for this - the pandemic was of course a factor, but so were a number of other things that I think have changed how I think about my career, my interests and my time.

But I digress!

The thing that hit me the most was that over the last five years or so, my field goal percentage on things was a lot higher - this mostly applied to work, but also to a lot of my personal projects. This sucks because it was primarily because I was taking fewer, more predictable shots (Sorry about the basketball analogy.)

Now some of this was good and intentional e.g. part of just growing in position in a large company, and helping rationalize things. It was something I explicitly started working on ~7 years ago. I was good at doing many things all at once, but part of my job first as a manager and then more broadly across the org was focussing things and making hard trade-offs.

But in the last three years, the change was much more profound than I’d intended.

In general, I do subscribe to the Gretzky quote,

“You miss a 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

and even more profoundly (apparently this is a Denzel quote?),

“If you don’t fail a lot, you’re not even trying.”

I realized that in my efforts at work to focus and some of the other professional situations I’d been in meant I was actually taking fewer big swings and risks, and exploring a lot less in the early stages (where risks are less costly anyway) than I used to.

At work, ensuring the staffing and exec attention on projects was probably the main reason for this. But in my personal life I’m less certain why. Scarcity of time and me wanting to be a lot more deliberate on how I chose to spend my free time which meant less exploration in general.

I’m lucky enough to have some time over the next few days to continue thinking about what I want to get done in 2023 (and beyond), but the biggest change for me will be taking more personal and professional (calculated?) risks.

Does that resonate for folks? What’s your biggest change for the new year?