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Revisiting “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” (Thinks Out Loud)

Group of people shaking hands on a deal to illustrate the idea of how to succeed this year, next year, and every year beyond that.

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There’s only one way to succeed this year & and every year. Success is more than just what you do in digital or marketing. Success goes far beyond just your business.

Of course success in digital and marketing and your business matters. But, business success often follows from success across multiple areas of your life. Successful people may seem like they’re accomplished in many areas… because they are. They’re not focused solely on being “their best selves” only at work or only in part of their lives. They bring that to every aspect of what they do.

It’s the idea of being your best self that’s at the heart of the conversation I want to have with you this week. What does “being your best self” look like in practice? What can you do to achieve it? And how does it apply not only in business, but across many areas of your life? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

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Revisiting “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes

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Running time: 25m 16s

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Transcript: Revisiting The Only Way to Succeed Next Year

Right before the end of last year, we had an episode called “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year.”

We’re roughly half way through the first quarter. 1/8th of the year is already behind us. And given that around 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by the end of January, it felt like a good time to revisit this discussion.

The key takeaways from the episode were around how you drive success. If driving success in your business — and your life — matters to you in 2025, you need to think beyond just business and marketing and digital.

You need to think about the kind of person you want to be, in every area of your life. You need to think about the kinds of relationships you want to have, the people you want to spend your time with, outside of business as well as within it. You need to do the work to get better in those areas, to improve your relationships with the people that matter to you.

Focus as much as you can on the areas and people that give your life meaning. Doing the work towards improving in those areas help you find flow in your activities, which help you feel more fulfilled overall. And finding greater fulfillment overall helps you persevere during the tougher times of your days and weeks and months.

I think you’ll enjoy this discussion. This is Thinks Out Loud, let’s dive in and revisit “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year”

Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 444 of the Big Show, and I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

Most of what I’m going to talk about in this episode, on the surface, has little to do with marketing or digital or business strategy, the topics we typically talk about here. I don’t have any big predictions for 2025 yet, or any major recap of 2024, you know, those are coming. And if you only care about those topics, you might want to skip to your other favorite podcast right now and then check our future episodes for that content.

I’d recommend against that though, because what’s also true is that what I plan to talk about today has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy. I suspect it will be obvious why shortly, but I’ll explicitly call out the reason at the end for you.

The thing is, as we come up on the end of the year, I have a problem with the conventional wisdom that almost everybody spouts off about almost every holiday season. You know, you’ll hear people say that it’s time to look back at the year you just experienced and what went well and what didn’t go well and what did you learn from those experiences. They’ll tell you to look ahead at what you hope to accomplish, and your goals for the new year, and what you’re going to do more of, and what you’re going to do better. Most people, many people, will tell you to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends. People will say, “You really need to make the most of this time. You never know how much longer you’ll have with grandma or grandpa, or your parents, or whomever.”

I hate this advice.

Now don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to challenge the conventional wisdom around what you do for the next two weeks. You should look back. You should look ahead to what you want to accomplish, and you absolutely should spend time with the people you love, and reconnect with old friends, and enjoy this time with your family.

My problem isn’t “Why aren’t you doing this during the holidays? “My problem is, “Why aren’t you doing this every single day and week and month throughout the year?” Seriously.

Yes, we should all use every opportunity. To look back at what we learned, we should use every opportunity to look forward to what we hope to accomplish. And we all should spend more time with family and friends and the people we love. If I wanted to be funny, I would say, “Notice how I listed friends, family, and the people you love into three separate categories?”

You know, in truth though, if they’re not the people you love, maybe the problem isn’t that, it’s that you maybe shouldn’t categorize them as family or friends. Maybe the reason they’re not the people you love is something you need to work on, and more on this in a bit. The reality though is don’t spend too much time with toxic people. And if everyone you know is toxic, Then I suspect they’re not the problem, and I will have much more on that a little later, too.

At any rate, when we’re talking about how you use this time, I think you really need to set yourself up for success every week and every month all year long. And I mean success in a broader way than just what you do in your business.

You may remember that I talked about a balance wheel or a wheel of life in last week’s episode. I’m not going to recap the whole process for you, but the idea is that this provides you a great time and a great tool to take stock of where you are in every area of your life that matters to you. Work? Sure. But also family and friends and your mental and physical and financial well being.

The great thing about an exercise like this is that you get to decide which of those areas are important to you. You also get to decide how satisfied you are in each of those areas, and you get to decide, once you’ve taken a look at that wheel, which ones you want to work on, and the order you’ll do that work.

That’s something you can do all year long, and that’s how you succeed next year. This isn’t about New Year’s resolutions, either, and it certainly isn’t about, you know, hustle culture, just “doing more.”

Don’t get me wrong, hustle culture can be useful, to a point, but it’s usually focused solely on your work. It usually thinks solely in terms of, what are you going to turn out today from a work perspective? Success in work is up to you and obviously important. It’s something I talk about on this show all the time. Work often is a huge contributor to the meaning in our lives. It’s also not the only thing that gives our lives meaning. In fact, I would go so far to say it shouldn’t be the only thing that matters to give your life meaning.

Instead, I’m talking about being the best version of yourself in all of the areas of your life that matter to you and that give your life meaning. And there’s a way that you can do this to drive improvement throughout your life, all year long, where New Year’s resolutions fail.

New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to work for two reasons, for at least two reasons. I mean, one of the big ones is that they often aren’t necessarily seen as fun. But the two big reasons are, one, that there’s no consequence, really, if you break them. You might feel bad about it for a couple of days, but eventually it’s just something that happened and you move on with life.

And the second is you have to wait an entire year for them to come back around again. If you didn’t accomplish this year’s New Year’s resolutions by, you know, if you haven’t made progress by the end of January, oh well, I guess it’s over. No big deal.

We’re drawn to New Year’s resolutions because the first day of the year is symbolically important. And that symbolism has a certain power, one that our brains latch on to. It’s really important to our minds, that date, because it’s imbued with so much culture and tradition. There’s research that backs this up, by the way, that our minds just get wrapped around specific dates. Days like New Year’s Day or the first of the year as being hugely important.

There’s also research that backs up what I’m about to share that’s just kind of crazy. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who to credit for this one. So while there will be links in the show notes for many of the things I’m talking about, there won’t be for this one. A Google search wasn’t helping me out. I will certainly update the links later if I can find it.

In any case, the further we get away from January 1st, the less power it holds over us. Its symbolism dwindles. Here’s the funny thing about that research, though. It showed that January 1st, isn’t the only symbolically important date in our lives. Other dates have meaning, too.

For instance, your birthday is a pretty big day. We give it a certain power in our minds. If you’re married, your wedding anniversary is another one of those days. If you have children, your kids birthdays have a certain power. And any of those can be used as days where you start something new or reassess or have the drive to start again, to renew yourself. Each of these are opportunities to reinvigorate and renew your focus on the things that matter to you.

But brace yourself, because the research found something even stranger. It turns out almost any day can hold that same symbolic power, as long as that date matters to you. Which is crazy, because it really means that almost any day is an opportunity to reinvigorate yourself and renew your focus on the things that matter to you. That’s incredible when you think about it, because now we’re not talking about New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking about where am I starting from today.

Now the funny thing is, if you find that too abstract a concept to get your head around, in terms of how you would execute that, there are two days that almost everyone recognizes as powerful And those are the first day of the month and the first day of the week, which means you don’t have to have New Year’s resolutions. You can have new month resolutions and new week resolutions. You can renew and reinvigorate every month and every week. You don’t have to think about what matters to you and what you want to change next year. Just think about what you want to change in January, and then again in February, and again in March.

You can do the same every Sunday or Monday too, depending on what you consider the first day of the week. It could be the first day of the week, it could be the first day of your work week. You, all you have to do is take a few minutes and make a short list of what you’re going to work on from your balance wheel this week. Then do it again the following week, and the following, and so on.

There’s this great hidden benefit to it, compared with New Year’s resolutions, by the way, that if a single week doesn’t go as planned, it doesn’t throw you off for the whole month or the whole year. You just reset on the following week, focus on what matters to you that week, and work towards becoming more completely yourself.

And the great thing is, whether you do this 12 times a year, or 52, or some number in between those, I mean, we can all have a week that gets away from us, you will end up growing as a person.

Over the course of those 52 weeks, you’ll end up building better relationships with the people who matter to you. Those outcomes, that focus, is what I mean when I’m talking about the only way to succeed next year. In this case, success isn’t just a business concept, it’s a life concept. It’s how you grow as a person.

Now the funny thing is, that growth has other benefits beyond just the obvious. And that’s where this does have something to do with marketing or digital or business strategy. In fact, it has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy.

Why?

Because the greatest successes in marketing and digital and business strategy, and pretty much anything else in life, occur when you’re your whole self, when you feel good about yourself, when you’re able to bring your entire being to the moment and to the thing that you’re working on.

I met somebody new and a client the other day whose approach just absolutely thrilled me, filled me with joy. He was so thoughtful and so present and so clear minded about his work and his life and what was important to him. He was so clear about what he thought he could do well and what he thought he couldn’t. He set appropriate boundaries with the people in the room without any argument or any drama. He simply wanted to focus on doing his very best work and supporting the team as a whole in the best way that he could. He is, already I’m finding out, just a delight to have met and work with. At least from what I can see on the surface, everything is going right for him. And I think it’s because he’s true to what matters to him.

If you look at the people who constantly gripe that nothing ever goes right, they’re almost always at least a little bit at fault.

Now, hang with me for a second. Because this is the internet, let me say right away, of course there are exceptions. Unfortunately, far too many cases exist where people are discriminated against or find themselves in abusive situations or have serious health issues. On a personal level, I’ve lost multiple family members and dear friends to things like cancer. I know people who struggle with mental illnesses and other very real problems in their lives.

Situations like that absolutely suck. There’s no two ways about it. And I offer anybody going through anything like that nothing but peace and comfort and good fortune every day going forward, starting today. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the people who you encounter from time to time — we all do — who really don’t have any major issues in their lives in any real terms and still find ways to bitch about everything in the world every day, right?

In high school, by the way, one of my teachers, a priest as it happens, once told me the difference between bitching and complaining. It’s pretty big. Complaining is when you talk about your problems to someone who can do something about them, who can help you improve the situation. Bitching is when you talk about your problems to everybody else.*

You know, and don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with bitching every now and again if it helps you move past something that’s bugging you. I bitch to my wife regularly about whatever things that are going on, whether trivial or significant, that has drawn my attention on any given day or in any given week. We all do. That’s normal. If you’re doing it all the time though, you know, maybe the problem isn’t with what’s going on in the world. Maybe it’s how you’re reacting to it.

So with all I’m that out of the the way and speaking only about those who bitch about quote-unquote, “everything” — as well as those of you who simply want to find new ways to succeed — the simple fact is you can change your outcomes by changing your outlook.

And I know that might sound trite. But it’s true, the groundbreaking work around flow, that is the state of operating at peak performance, you know, fully in the zone, identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, depends on three factors. And those three factors are, you’re working towards a single clear goal.

That goal matters to you, it’s meaningful in your life, and the work challenges you without overwhelming you. It, it causes you to push yourself. When you’re working with flow, you feel energized across many areas of your, areas of your life. You’re happier as a person, you’re more fully yourself. In other words, working towards your goals will make you feel better in pretty much all the other areas of your life.

So even if you don’t love where you are in your career, or maybe your company is struggling and you’re not in a position at the moment to do a lot about it. But if you imagine you’re spending time each week and each month learning from what you’d accomplished in the prior week or month, that would move you towards a meaningful goal of self improvement.

Imagine if you were truly present for your family and friends and the people you love, that would move you towards the meaningful goal of building stronger and healthier relationships. Even when you can’t find flow at work, you can find flow in the other areas of your life, Which are areas that are going to continue to exist even as you change jobs and careers over the course of your working life.

Working in this way on yourself helps you become a more fully realized version of yourself, which actually helps you become more focused and thoughtful at work. And quite possibly help you move forward as a digital marketer and strategist. And if not, you’ll still be fulfilled outside of work. You know, that’s really a great thing.

It reminds me of a quote I love about strategy from the Lois McMaster Bujold book, “The Vor Game,” which you should totally check out. A character in the book says, “The key to strategy. Is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory.” Now, in fairness, she follows that up by saying, “ideally,” acknowledging that it’s not always easy to have all paths lead to victory every single time. Still, it’s worth choosing as many as you can that help.

So, if you’re not necessarily having the best place at work, working on yourself is something you can control. Working on your relationships is something you can control.

And that goes the other way, too. If you’re doing well in work, it allows you to say, “Okay, maybe I can’t control what’s happening with my relationships or a specific relationship, because the other person is not being everybody. They can’t control it. You would like them to be, but you can work on yourself and you can work on your work.”

So ultimately, it’s working towards all paths helping you to succeed. If your success matters to you next year though, you need to think beyond just business and just marketing and just digital. You need to think about the kind of person you want to be in every area of your life. You need to think about the kinds of relationships you want to have, the people you want to spend your time with outside of business as well as within it.

And then do the work in those areas to improve your relationships with the people that matter to you. Make sure you focus as much as you can on the areas and people that give your life meaning. Working towards improving in those areas helps you find flow in your activities, which will help you feel more fulfilled overall.

And finding greater fulfillment overall helps you persevere during the tougher times of your days and weeks and months that undoubtedly will happen. Remember that you don’t have to think about New Year’s resolutions or wait for January 1st to roll around to make changes. You get to reset your objectives and renew your focus every month and every week.

So the point I want to leave you with today is that your ability to be the person you want to be is entirely in your hands. And becoming the person you truly want to be is, in my book, The only real way to succeed next year, and every year after that. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I hope you get to spend it with people you love, and that everything next year goes really well for you. Just remember, a lot of that is within your hands, and I can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Show Wrap-Up and Credits

Do you know anybody that needs to hear this today? Do you know anyone who needs to hear what we just talked about. I’m pretty sure you just thought of someone. So be sure to share this episode with them.

And of course, like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you regularly get your podcasts. Until next time, I hope you’re well, I hope you’re safe, and I hope you take care of yourself.

We’ll see you soon.

Tim Peter is the founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates. You can learn more about our company's strategy and digital marketing consulting services here or about Tim here.

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