January Was Just Practice
Most of us enter January on the life equivalent of a Red Bull high: amped, but in an intense, jittery way that inevitably leads to crash.
In almost everything else, some kind of slow, measured warm-up is considered good form — you rehearse before a speech, train before a marathon, tinker with an email before hitting send. You don’t start a year cold if you want to do it right. Which is why Mollie Chen, the founder of Birchbox, recently suggested a small calendar tweak in her newsletter: Think of January as the staging area for the year, a time for you to carefully and deliberately make your plans and set your goals. February is the real start.
“This past month has really just been practice,” Chen wrote. “So as we enter 2021” — now!— “I’m hopeful that things will start trending for the better: friends and family slowly getting vaccinated, winter inching steadily toward spring, and our government becoming a bit more functional.”
Fresh starts can be found wherever we look for them. Happy new year.
