I’m not sure reflecting back on one's life as deeply as I did over the weekend is the best idea. What I thought was going to be a quick read through of my blogs in preparation for my first book writing session turned into three full days, 9 hours per day, of studying my life in granular detail. It was weird, confronting, sad and kind of surreal.
I never intended to read through all 305 blogs I’d written but it made sense as a starting point to see what, if anything, could be salvaged for a book. I can also confirm that those blogs were never intended to be read in such a fashion. Back to back, one after the other was a silly thing to do but it also offered some interesting insights that could only have been discovered through such a ridiculous exercise.
Firstly I wanted to categorise them all if only to help reference them at a later date. I wasn’t even sure what categories to use so I just started to read and noted what jumped out. Being a stationary nut I also had matching tabs and dot stickers to help organise these said categorises. I ended up with four main categories: business, mindset, networking/human connections and outputs/activities/ things I do. Within each category there were multiple subsets including some favourites like talking to strangers, rental rants, becoming a citizen and amateur hour.
I had also got Chat GPT to do a 50 word summary of each blog that I printed out and stuck to the hallway wall in the hopes it would reveal some kind of amazing insight. One thing it did reveal is how AI wiped all emotion and personally from my writing. It turned some of my most emotional blogs into a matter of fact, list of events.
Dealing with business closure, the author describes liquidation’s grief, auctioning assets, and painful valuations. Despite heartbreak and anxiety, family routines and small joys offer comfort. Community support and resilient perspective soften the loss. Metamorphosis metaphor frames a difficult ending as a possible new beginning and patient recovery.
This sounds nothing like me! AI removed all the parts that make this a human story. My story. In some ways this could be useful as it makes the content benign. It is what it is. Side note here: Interestingly at work this week there was talk about how AI is essentially eating its own tail as it runs out of original content since AI has now created almost everything that exists online. It suddenly felt irresponsibly feeding it 300,000 words of original content to feast upon!
After three days of reading through my life, I used my dot stickers to plot my different categories. One of the first things I noted was how important people/networking has become. When I first started, I was running multiple businesses with a 3 and 4 year old within arms reach. It was still just Matt and myself. We had no employees and covid was about to hit. I wrote about work (red stickers) and lots about the stuff I was reading. During Covid I joined the AGDA Vic Council and jumped into a few online networking groups which was the start of me connecting with others (yellow stickers) outside of my immediate circle.
Networking became a huge part of my role for our pre-fab building business and led to my involvement in more community leadership groups. ‘Connecting with others’ is now a HUGE part of my story, it also coincides with the rise of amazing opportunities that seem to come my way. Working hypothesis: More (authentic) connections = more (wild) opportunities.
There were so many great stories about awesome things that have happened to us but there were lots that made me sad. When I read through some of the ones about HUCX, about how hard we were working and how convinced we were that we would succeed, you can’t help but feel a sense of loss for those versions of ourselves. Knowing how that we don’t make it, knowing that we are still dealing with the consequences of those decisions is tough. There were so many moments where I wanted to scream ‘pull the plug!’ ‘get out while you still can’ but it only falls on the deaf ear of the past.
What I have done is iterate quickly. I keep creating sub categories as another part of our life takes shape. Starting a new chapter if you will. Parenting, TinyOffice, HUCX, The Design Dept, AGDA, BBW, Future Shapers, Tech School, writing, running, speaking - it's forever changing because I have designed it as such. I want to live an interesting life. The things that happen to us, don’t define us. We get to decide what we take from life's challenges and I now have empirical evidence that everything really is either good news or a good story.
