“The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.”
Or,
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Nearing the end of the year, I’m starting to think about next year’s theme. But before I get into that, I think it’s worth reviewing how this year’s theme went.
TL;DR – poorly.
Looking back on how I defined my theme for the year, I think the idea was solid, but I lacked clarity on what exactly I meant to do differently. One big mistake is that, outside of the start of the year, I mostly never thought about it again. It didn’t serve as a “north star” like so many yearly themes do. Whereas the Year of Time (2023,) kept popping up everywhere I looked, the Year of Scales of Arpeggios mostly just happened.
In the blog post linked above, I set out three specific plans I intended to engage in. If you haven’t clicked through, they were:
- Wake up before work, use that time productively.
- Build a system for meal planning.
- Learn to play disc golf.
And dear reader, I did approximately none of them.
That’s not quite entirely fair, I actually did get really good at waking up earlier. But I don’t really use the time productively. I think the end result is that I’m more “awake” when work starts, and that has some positive benefits, but never not once did I ever get my treadmill time in before the day started. Planning the day continues to be an elusive challenge. Executing the plan even more so.
It feels hardly worth even mentioning the other two, beyond saying that I didn’t even start to try. I forgot I meant to. The year got away from me and now here we are, on the precipice of December, and I don’t think I’m planning to start any of that in the remaining four weeks.
We can’t win them all, and I didn’t win this one. On to bigger and better things!