52 Good Things from 2022

The 16th year of my annual gratitude practice, now spanning 834 good things.

Per usual, I’m late on finishing this gratitude practice. What happens is that I keep a draft over the course of the year and then it takes me awhile to finalize.

I’d started doing these in 2007 as a check against the stress I was feeling as a dirt-poor first-time entrepreneur. I was worried about the opportunity cost of leaving my job and thought that if I couldn’t find at least 52 highlights from the year then I was making a career mistake. This year, all the sacrifices (mainly uncertainty and pay cuts) suddenly came together as me being the perfect candidate for my dream job. It only took 15.5 years!

Here are my prior lists:
2021, 2020, 2016–19, 2013–15, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

This was a wild year, work wise. I had gotten it into my head that I was going to enter a stage of half-retired solo-creator and spend the rest of my days researching and writing an encyclopedia of wisdom, taking the Codex Vitae concept and just making it a way of life. This idea was fueled in a big way from Michael Bungay Stanier’s concept of worthy goals from his book How to Begin. I wanted to work less, but still work on something big.

But then I found out the top job at Medium was available, started lobbying hard for it, and got it. It has a stark side effect: I went from half-employed to extremely over employed.

The Before Medium Time

I’m sure I worked on a lot of things early in the year because I had a coaching business, a coach training business, and three publications. But I was also looking to transition and so the work that stood out as good things were related to that.

1. Started organizing my writing into a Codex (now offline).

2. Wrote 132 newsletters. Focused my daily newsletter as a way to research my Codex. Honestly, this would have been a nice life: research and publish, and build up an encyclopedia of knowledge that would at least be useful to me. All while traveling and being free of management hassles. Alas.

The Journey to Medium

Here is, basically, how I got the top job at Medium.

3. The Conversation. I sniffed out that something was up with Medium on, I think, a Thursday. So I…