Something feels a little different as this new year begins. There seems to be a lack of excitement about 2023 ending and 2024 beginning. Sure, people post on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), and the other socials to mark the occasion of another year gone. Goal guides and lighthearted memes fill the feeds. But the ball has dropped, and it felt more like a tired groan than a party.
Or maybe I’m reading into it. 2023 was a particularly brutal one for me. My dad died. Two months later, I was included in a 40-person group layoff situation. And the mass adoption of AI tools was still in early stage, a few months young, but the possibility of disruption across the jobs landscape was beginning to look very real, very quickly.
I had many heated debates with an old college journalism buddy about the need to adapt or die, but he was fiercely skeptical. No matter how many pictures I painted about the types of work that were about to change drastically, he refused to see the hype as anything but a passing fad. Okay man, you do you, I said. And then I pushed forward with three projects I felt I could believe in for one year.
First, I set myself up with all the tools and space I needed to operate as an independent consultant, a freelancer, a business operator. Dad was gone, but he’d been a solopreneur his entire life, and if he could see me now, he’d probably say, “It’s about time.” With a few clients, I could stay fresh and keep enough time free for the next two projects.
Second, I started writing again for personal productivity. For the first time since my early days writing for newspapers and magazines, I was producing more words and narratives than I had in the last decade and a half of my life. Within months, I had a 90,000-word book manuscript. Perhaps it will see an audience one day, but for now it doesn’t matter. What mattered was a renewed commitment to human-generated creativity and the value of storytelling, despite the fact that words are cheaper than ever when a few well-constructed, chained prompts to an AI can spit out reams of content in seconds.
Third, I signed up for all the webinars about AI that could fit in one man’s calendar. There was a whole lot of hype and bloat, but also hours of thoughtful ideas and execution. In the first year or two of exploding AI, it was both exciting and sickening to track the successful uses and the blatant abuses of all that was possible, or at least within reach. My notes from these trainings and case studies and roundtable discussions might actually outweigh the book I wrote in word count, but large chunks are probably already obsolete. But you keep moving forward. Adapting, not dying.
2024 will be creating things, constant learning, helping others, and pushing forward with projects that feel like good work. And it may have taken a while, but here is my modest home on the web. The world doesn’t need another blog about technical marketing, or SEO, or conversion rate optimization, or programming, so, if I do blog here, it will be playful, and sometimes short.
Better late than not at all.