Why You Should Make This Your Year of Depth
When you strive for self-improvement, there are countless books, apps, techniques, etc. that promise to “fix” you or help you become better than you can. Newsletters, meditation apps, yoga studios, books promising to help you “put it all together” – there is no shortage of products, services and experiences in our culture.
But what if, instead of acquiring new hobbies or projects, you turn to your old interests and pursue them with enthusiasm and determination? What if you tried it for a whole year?
This is what David Kane suggested on his Raptitude blog . He wrote that the idea, which he considered to be the Year of Depth, immediately “caught fire”. With the Year of Depth, you go “deeper, not wider”:
A Year of Depth was supposed to be hypothetical – a reflection of how our consumer reflexes tend to overwhelm our expectations. Because it is so easy to acquire new activities, we tend to start too often what are actually huge projects of a lifetime (like painting or learning a language) and it’s too easy to give them up.
This chronic lack of follow through makes us feel bad, but even worse, we never reach the level of satisfaction we hoped for when we first bought a guitar or pencils to draw. Instead, we find ourselves on a kind of novelty treadmill – before something clicks, we move on to the exciting beginnings of something new.
Avoiding buying new things is key, but perhaps more important, Cain writes, is the recognition that “depth” means different things to everyone. For some, this may mean accepting what you have and not buying new toys. “For others, it’s a more general loss reduction, suspicion of an incentive to acquire, and a reorientation toward what really matters,” he writes.
The goal is to delve deeper into your current goals and hobbies – reading books you already have, practicing more yoga poses instead of trying meditation for the first time, etc. – to stay on course and “cultivate” value what we are already doing.
Cain writes that the Year of Depth helped him create “a new lens for looking at the tools and possibilities that have always been there.” “Opportunity was everywhere,” he writes, “if you learn to look for it.”
This shift in perspective can help you overcome our culture’s continuing need for more and better. Instead of thinking about what you don’t have or can’t do, you dive deeper into what you already have and what you can do.