Year 45: Devotion and Severance

Dear Stephen:

You spent the past year thinking you were going to depart from where you were, but you failed to take more than a single step before backsliding into comfort and safety, even at the cost of another year wasted.

This year, you need to do better than taking a single step — you need to take a big leap without fear or regret, knowing that where you end up after the next year must be better than where you started.

This means your two words for the year must be devotion and severance; the former is for pressing yourself into trying to actually fix your shit, and the latter is for pressing yourself into cutting out the distractions that keep you from avoiding The Work.

“Severance”, in this context, means cutting yourself off from those distractions by any means necessary, for their continued use during your average day makes focusing on The Work that much harder for you to do.

That said, “severance” can, in its most extreme form, refer to pulling yourself completely off the Internet for an extended period of time and/or remaking your “identity” all over again, because “Regular Mouse” feels like a temporary solution to a problem of your own making.

You must get through Year 45 in a way that pushes you further out from where Year 44 left you, for if you waste one more year doing nothing but being a lazy asshole, you will have effectively ensured your own irrelevance and destroyed your ability to change.