This morning I woke up reminiscing about Twitter’s days of ‘What are you doing?’. (Now, of course, it is ‘What’s happening?’.)
When you remove the micro-blog-scopic tendency to answer the question at face value – there is such fantastic depth to it. What are you doing? What role are you playing? What change are you making? What are your actions resulting in? What impact will you have on the world? How can you transform thoughts and ideas into reality? Can you see your objectives and goals through to completion?
For me, what an individual is doing is one of the most attractive qualities they can embody. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about where you came from, what you are on paper, what you look like, who you have in your networks, where you live – it’s what you have done and what you are currently doing. Your goals, ambitions and vision are definitely important but it’s when they’ve been chipped away at – that the beauty blossoms. If you are capable of doing, then you are capable of doing anything.
The following is probably cliché, but I believe if you really want to do what you set out to do, you do need to be optimistic, confident, patient, persistent, flexible and pragmatic (yes, as well as many other things). It’s also a fairly big claim to make, but the more I do, the happier I become. Obviously, a lot of other factors are in play but it’s been great to identify something so simple and bring it to top of mind.
This year, I’ve met such a diverse spectrum of people who are actually doing stuff and it’s been so refreshing. When you are around people who are doing, you are encouraged to do. It’s infectious. It’s also incredibly energetic. And I thank those people who I’ve come across.
I hope to meet many more in 2010.
Kate Kendall 
This is a great question to ask oneself regularly – ‘what are you doing?’. Personally Ive found it at times a great wake up call and at other times I’ve been surprised to find new that my actions are manifestations of priorities I didnt realise I had. Thank you for reminding me to ask myself this question again as the New Year approaches!
Thanks for the response Andrew. Love the sentence “…my actions are manifestations of priorities I didn’t realise I had.”
BTW, are you on Twitter? I couldn’t find your handle.
Merry Christmas too.
Very interesting piece Kate. So many people are judged on who they know, where they’ve worked, the awards they’ve won etc. I am astonished by the number of people you seem to meet. How much longer can you keep meeting people?
Thanks for the comment Stan.
I guess I will keep on meeting people until I exhaust the amount of people available in the world to meet. At the rate the world is growing and at the rate in which I can actually meet people, it turns out that I practically have an infinite amount at my fingertips.
It gets better too – I was previously only meeting people in a professional sense… you know, conferences, @socialmelb, coffees etc. Now, I’ve started to get back into Gumtree for sport partners, thus I have a whole week of tennis ahead of me!