Year in Review - 2021
Celebrate your wins
Every year I receive the barrage of newsletters titled "Year in Review", but until this year I have never understood why. Why email dozens to thousands of people telling them about your achievements and failures? Well, because it feels nice. When you have things to be happy about and learnings to reflect on, you feel good talking about them. Like the social media dopamine release, but slower.
I’ve had “Year in Review” on my newsletter ideas list for a bit. I have been hesitant to write one because I didn’t want to be in that category of people “gloating” or “stroking their ego”. But now that I have thought about it for a while it really isn’t gloating, if done right.
2021 has been an interesting year for me. I've made pretty extreme goals and achieved most of them. At the end of 2020 my wife, cat, and I took a five-day drive from Florida to Washington State. This started our biggest change of the year – living in the PNW. While it hasn’t come without its challenges, it was the spark I needed to push forward on my other challenging goals of the year.
In February of 2021 my docu-series, The Gray Area of Remote Work got funded by Adobe. This was a huge milestone for me. The problem was that I was too tired and burnt out from my day job. This lead me down a path of deep thought. Reassessing what I needed to do about my job for my mental health.
June came around. At this point, I had time to film most of my docu-series and assess what I needed for my health. I put in my two weeks at my day job. This was the moment that the weight of five years of torture was lifted off my shoulders. I then went full steam on my docu-series after a few weeks of rest and resetting.
At the start of August, I began to release The Gray Area of Remote Work, week-by-week, for four weeks. Doing so not only released my idea to the digital world, but also set my feet down the path of being a thought leader in remote storytelling. Towards the end of August, into September I started talking with people and businesses of all sizes about their remote filmmaking process – tools and practices. This allowed me to start consulting around the topic.
Fast forward to November, after years of applying, I finally became a Notion Ambassador. This seems like a small milestone to most, but this was big for me because it brought eyes to my capabilities when making systems. This opened the door to my latest achievement, consulting using Notion. While the ambassador goal was coming about I also was releasing my first Skillshare course – Remote Filmmaking: Plan, Produce, Edit, and Deliver Engaging Remote Films. This was a challenging process for more than one reason, but I learned a lot and hope to make another in the future.
As for the smaller things – I also upped the frequency of this letter to weekly, got featured on Workspaces.xyz, my Notion Website Builder was downloaded 245 times, my Figma Instagram UI Kit was downloaded 7.5k times, and I applied to way too many jobs. My Notion Job Tracker has gotten so much use, I think I need to revamp it soon with my latest changes.
If you want to see all my milestones, I added a timeline to my website.
The moral of this long story is that all your achievements, big or small, are worthy of celebration. You can celebrate by screaming them from a rooftop or mountain, or you can write a few hundred words.
Lastly, happy holidays to you and your family! 🌲 🎁 🕎 🥂
