Begin as you mean to go on

“Begin as you mean to go on”

I heard this phrase at the beginning of 2008, on Breda Dayne’s Cast On. I was struck by it then – such a clever phrase – but never explored it. It's really lovely, so much more poetic than the idea of New Year's Resolutions and with so many more implications. Every new project that can be started with the notion of  “Begin as you mean to go on”.

At the beginning of this year, as I started work on my new website, it came to me again.
How do I want to go on in 2009? How do I want the new website to go on?

I don’t “do” resolutions. I love lists and I love setting intentions. But the concept of “resolutions” doesn't resonate for me. I'd rather remind myself on a regular to basis to learn, improve and grow.

And that, the growing, is what appealed to me in Chris Brogan’s  post about picking a word as a goal for the year. At about  the same time, Lisa Call wrote about choosing a word to set her intention.  These two posts stirred something, stirred that phrase “Begin as you mean to go on” and I began to think about my intentions for this new site and the new year.

I set intentions for nearly every day, could I expand that to a year? The intention would need to be simple; just a few, memorable words that would guide my business decisions this year. I can look at every decision and say, will this be in alignment with my intention?

So what did I come up with?

Kill it. Share it.

When it came to me I knew that's it! But, ugh, I hate the violent connotations of the phrase “kill it” or it's similar “crush it”. What I mean when I say I want to “kill it” is that I want to achieve excellence, I want to become as fabulous as I can, to learn as much as possible. But the phrase “learn it” just doesn’t have that same push, that same insistence. Is there another word that invokes this sort of insistent drive towards excellence?

As I was thinking over this excellence, I read about succulence – the state of being juicy. That’s what I want! I want to infuse my work with juiciness –  full of richness of texture and color.

It somehow goes along with “kill it”. I want to bring succulence to it, to enjoy it, to delve into it thoroughly.
I’m still unsure of the right word, something to align the ‘Kill' with the ‘Succulence'…is there anything in between?

There we go, that’s my expanded Intention for 2009: Kill it (make it juicy), Share it.

And what is the “it”?

The “it” is whatever it needs to be. The “it” is yet to come, the “it” can change. For the next few weeks, the “it” is designing the Month of Love Series, learning about video editing, launching a new video project, organizing a mill-spun line of yarns.

So this is how I'm beginning. I'm learning, infusing and sharing.

What do you want to learn this year? What do you hope to share?