A Storyworthy Year

On Tempered New Year's Resolutions

I wrote to you last on New Year’s Day. In Songbook #8: Tiny Changes, I mentioned how I was thinking of the daily habits I can build to improve my life and the lives of the people closest to me. Hours later I finished Atomic Habits and, whilst braaiing boerewors for my family, I started plotting how I was going to make this year remarkable.

This is when I got carried away. Perhaps the caramelised onions dancing around Joey’s boerewors drippings inside the Ultimate Hot Dog Roll™, gave me that sniff of perfection that I immediately wanted to seek in all areas of my life. Once I’d finished my boerewors roll, which I soon realised was my allotment for the year, I would be chasing those goals and pictured The New Me taking my son Thomas for a swim in Majorca, Corfu, Tofo Beach, the Camps Bay Tidal Pool. 

I would quit drinking, until at least the day after I start receiving compliments about my photoshopped physique, and promptly signed up for several 6am classes in my remaining week of holiday. That day would come soon, I mused, before attending only one of those classes. On Monday 2 January 2023, I arrived fresh faced at the Virgin Active in Claremont and took my seat on a spinning bike beside a 65 year old woman in an empty class. 

We stared ahead and warmed up, and before long, the Portuguese Jessica Fletcher beside me had solved the mystery. She reckoned that class had been erroneously added to the Virgin Active app by someone who forgot that the 2nd of January was a public holiday. And it made complete sense. With no sage to guide us into the new year, we cycled in silence at a comfortable pace, and I felt a shared moment between us when we realised that we would not be hurtling towards our new selves, as we had both recently planned.

It was not just Virgin Active that had dropped the ball. Meta, Inc.’s algorithms got lazy and veered off course from the New Year, New You starter pack of Russian Kettlebells, a Wim Hof ice bath and the Lululemon tights that were clearly in my mind’s eye. Instead, later that day whilst scrolling from the couch and feeling somewhat parched, they presented me with a picture of Anthony Bourdain, drinking a cold pint and giving me a “What the fuck do you want?” stare.

The quote beneath Bourdain suggested I “Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you've never been.” It didn’t take long for me to reflect on the fact that I quite like drinking cold pints at 4pm in mostly empty bars. And I started to think of the quality humans in my life that I would love to have a drink and spin a yarn with this year.

Now don’t confuse this as a call to action for you to shelve your New Year’s Resolutions on week one. This is about something bigger. Because seeing Bourdain staring at me over that frosty pint made me think about the type of life I want to be living this year. That is: I want 2023 to be a year that is memorable, for all the right reasons.

How does this tie in with the Atomic Habits and Tiny Changes that I’ve been bandying on about? Well, for starters, if you want to have a memorable life, you may want to consider having a system to help you remember what’s going on in your life. This made me think of this daily reflection exercise I heard about, called Homework For Life, from an author and storyteller, Matthew Dicks.

The idea is that at the end of every day, you take a few minutes and ask yourself, “What was the most Storyworthy moment of my day?” Even if it doesn’t feel particularly poignant at the time, you just write down a few sentences in your notebook or spreadsheet about any story you might tell a friend over a dinner table. Dicks says that “There are meaningful, life-changing moments happening in your life all the time … Find your stories. Collect them. Save them forever.”

I leapt up off the couch, immediately inspired to buy Matthew Dicks’ book, Storyworthy. Barely a minute had passed until I returned to the couch with my Kindle, albeit with slightly less slouched posture. “This is it!”, I thought, “This is the book I need to read to get my year zooting forwards”. And before it was fully downloaded I decided that I had just embarked on a quest to become a better storyteller. Matthew Dicks, the author from Woonsocket, Rhode Island would be my sage this year, and not the spinning instructor from Claremont who no-showed at 6am that morning. That’ll show him.

The foreword to Storyworthy was written by Dan Kennedy, the founder of The Moth Podcast. There was one sentence that jumped out at me: “(Matthew Dicks) taught me that trying to get better at storytelling also meant trying to get better at being a friend, or a son, a boyfriend, a brother, or just a better person.”

And for the third time in 2023, at 4:45pm on 2 January, I needed to retrace my steps and temper my New Year’s Resolutions. Because reading that sentence in the foreword, I thought that while it would be nice to become a better storyteller in 2023, a far better outcome would be becoming a better family man, entrepreneur, friend… and then maybe a writer. 

The line from Atomic Habits that left a mark on me is “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” And while I plan to document my first full year as a dad through my Homework For Life Google Sheet, I think I’ll be paying less attention to the storyworthiness of it all, and more attention to whether I like reading about the person I’m becoming.