by Jim Dickens January 2, 2024
At my company, as with many companies, sometimes it needed to evolve or change. Once, the executive team was given a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. We all read, discussed and mostly forgot it. But some of it stuck with me. In my own words, making change requires effort, discipline, persistence, and mind space. So attempting to make many simultaneous significant changes is bound to fail. With that in mind, I enter the New Year.
Instead of a lot of big ambitious well defined goals, I am going for an easy guideline with many ambiguous avenues for success. Let’s call it New Ruts. Life is going well right now and most things beyond maintenance are squared away. Family, shelter, and finance are set for now. So it’s a perfect time to be incremental in improvement. I am going to stay in my current habits or in a rut and just do new things that are closely adjacent. If they are better than the old things, then I will switch into the new rut.
I am not sure on what all the new ruts are but here are a few examples under consideration. I do the old guy sports of golf and fly fishing so Pickleball is just a step away. Next door to fly fishing is fly tying so maybe. Eating is becoming a bigger deal as it does for many as you get older so maybe becoming proficient at cooking. The guideline takes the place of difficult, unpleasant, doomed to fail New Year’s resolutions.
In October, a well meaning but misguided Mexican airport security guard confiscated my saltwater flies. I head back to Mexico in a few days and have started tying flies for the trip so 2024 New Rut success is off to a good start.
R1T Tour 