Looking back on 2014, in all that I accomplished at work, at home, I keep thinking of one word:
foundation.
At SmallBox, we focused on our people, process and place. During our winter Factory Week we mapped out our entire creative process, looking for places we might improve. After a year of leasing the old Broad Library, we purchased the building, making it our long-term home base. And we intentionally invested in professional development and career paths for the first time. We didn’t grow a lot, but we’ve prepared ourselves for it in 2015 and beyond by building a really solid foundation.
In my personal life, this year was all about finding the right place to call home. In July, we finally found the one, and have since been working to make it our own. We still have a few boxes left to unpack. Some of the rooms are not the right color. There’s more furniture to buy. But the house has great bones and is the sort of place we could live in until the end of our days. A foundation for a full life.
With some of these major things in place, I can’t help but feel like 2015 could be a wild and wonderful year, with growth at work, time to put toward upping my creative game, and to get back to the travel we put on hold for most of last year.
I haven’t picked a word yet for 2015, and I don’t know if I will. I’d never have chosen foundation as my word for 2014. With hindsight, I can see that was exactly how it all unfolded, and was just what I needed.
This post is part of Think Kit by SmallBox
Prompt: “A Single Word. What one word sums up the past year? Now: unpack, unfold, and uncover it. What does it represent? What events float to the top when you think about your word? And, okay, if you can’t limit yourself to a single word…use a (select) few.”