2021’s Last Letter

Good morning friends

Today is the fiftieth and final letter of this year. In my first letter of the year, I wrote “This will not be an easy year.” In the second, a week later, I said “This year will be overwhelming and tiring.”

This has been true, for you, for me, for all of us. There has also been much good, and I will get to that, but for now, let’s pause and accept that it has been hard. It has been hard, and still, we are here. You are reading. I am writing. You look back over the year and know that you have achieved much, that you’ve added love to people’s lives, and that you have received love. Well done, you can be quietly proud.

Today’s letter travels back over some of the conversations that we’ve had together. I found it enriching to see how the tapestry unfolded. I hope that you do too.

Please do share it with your friends and colleagues, it would be great to know that this work is travelling far. If you have a moment, head over to my LinkedIn page and comment on today’s post – it would be great to hear your views on the year’s letters.

In late February, I decided that it would be useful for us to get some context on how pandemics have impacted on the world across history. I turned to Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow to do so and wrote The Coronavirus Context. As a reminder Christakis, director of Yale’s  Human Nature Lab, estimated that vaccine or not, the pandemic will start to dissipate in mid-2022 and the socio-economic effects will linger until 2024. So, take this time to rest and rejuvenate. We still have a way to go, but the end is in sight.

In late June, I fell ill but was hopefully optimistic that it wasn’t Covid. I wrote of those early days in No More Lemons. I was wrong, it was Covid, and it hit me hard. I kept writing to you throughout those three weeks. Your messages kept me going and the writing helped me make sense of those dark days. As the worst of the virus passed, I wrote to you and said I’m Still Standing. Many of you said it was the best account of the Covid experience that you’d read – thank you.

As you know, I work with between 8 and 10 people each week. My clients are based in different sectors and countries, leading in different roles. We spend 90 minutes together in deep conversation and so by the time I sit down to write this letter, I feel that through that depth and diversity, I have a good sense of what would be useful for all of us.

In September many of my clients were reflecting that they had experienced much loss, they were tired, feeling overwhelmed, and had to (and wanted to) manage the demands of work and life.

It is a sentiment we can all resonate with, being tired and still wanting to be excellent, to make a difference, to be our best selves. It was with this in this mind that I wrote The Story Behind the Story. My hope was that we would all pause, to acknowledge that these two years have been hard for all of us, and to celebrate the spirit that lives in all of us, the spirit that inspires to be our best.

Managing the demands of the year required pragmatic action, so I shared some ideas in Preventing Burnout, Making Work a Happier Place, and Building Sustained Performance. Time and again, my clients tell me how liberating it is to turn off notifications on their phones, to delete apps, to plan and take time for deep thinking and reflection. It always leaves them feeling better and more energised.

For those of you who want to take a rigorous approach to reviewing this year and planning for next, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more comprehensive guide than How To Conduct An Annual Life Review (you can thank Brendan McNulty for sharing this with us).

Case studies and biography are powerful ways to learn. They take us into the complexity of life, providing us with nuance and insight that theories, in their abstraction, necessarily cannot do. Ideally, we engage with both the detail and the abstraction, the complexity, and the principle.

Through our letters we conversed with rockstars Skin and Elton John; Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai; Reed Hastings and Hamdi Ulukaya, respectively the founders of Netflix and Chobani. We drew inspiration from Suzanne’s Simard’s work on the primordial intelligence of forests and from the canny negotiation skills of eight Pacific Island countries who improved their terms of trade with global fishing fleets. All along the way we were reminded that curiosity opens us to possibility, that persistent and intentional action creates possibility, and that success has many different measures.

In closing today’s letter, I return to art. On Tuesday, I visited the Michaelis School of Fine Art’s graduate show. As always, the work was incredible. I was captivated by the power of Amber Alcock’s work. Her intentional disruption of our often-insular human-centric lens, gives rise to works like When the Rooster Crows. Her graduate show was sold out, a well-deserved recognition of her work. I was struck by the power of Wooju Lee’s work and her reflection that “sometimes a smile is, in fact, something one learns to do when other responses are futile, something that masks the true feelings of helplessness and sadness.” It is a reminder to truly listen to the world around us, to listen for the note behind the note. Cassian Robbertze’s Abdication of Identity speaks to a topic that is increasingly dominant in my conversation with clients, our struggle to wrestle ourselves and our time out of the grasps of the digital world. Lastly, I have no doubt that Bonginkosi Majoka will become a photographer to watch over the next few years.

It is a great privilege to be able to write to you each week. Thank you for inviting me into your homes and businesses. Thank you for the messages of encouragement, for agreeing and disagreeing with me, for reaching out and asking for book recommendations, for sharing your own reading and sources of inspiration. Each connection enriches these words. Thank you to my clients, without our conversations this letter would not be possible. It is your wisdom and insight that help me shape what is said here.

I will return on the 23rd of January. In the interim, I wish you rest, happiness, and peace.

Karl

PS: If you’d like to subscribe to this letter, you can do so here.