PETALS Weekly - Find your Ikigai

Foreign.

It is Monday the 13th of Jan, 2025 and this is the second petals weekly, reflecting on the past week of all the good things that's been going on. So as we're getting back into the swing of things for 2025, I've been getting quite productive, quite enthusiastic. Got a lot of new energy after the festive break and downtime, but I've got loads and loads of ideas of things I want to be doing and some quite big moments to enjoy this year. Throughout the week I've been gathering some thoughts around the Petals app that we're working on. We'll have some insights into our house finesse plans for the year and I'll also be touching on concepts I've learned about this week, a Japanese concept called ikigai. So let's start off with what is ikigai?

I think one of the big things for me this week has been around purpose and intentionality. It's a bit of a buzzword I guess, but I've been thinking a lot lately about my personal purpose. What are my key skills and strengths? How am I different? What is my usp? Why should I bother doing things like this? It's not because I don't want to. I just want to make sure I get the right message across for the right audience. Earlier in the week I was listening to an audiobook about the Japanese concept of ikigai. I put out a post on my blog, Normal Socials to see if anyone had heard of it. Very limited response. A couple of people respond, reacted. I don't think it's very commonly known. You know, we hear a lot about KZ and Kanban and all the Japanese sorts of concepts and theories. This one's a little bit less or no. I'd recommend reading into it or even listening the same audiobook I did. What I like about it overlaps your personal purpose in life with health and well being for a long time. It's based on a lot of communities in Japan who have a very calm and happy long life. So they talk a lot about diet, sleeping patterns and community and well being and all those sort of very important things that we talk about when, especially with Petals is the serenity part, how stressed we really are. For me, I also want to make sure that I'm managing that but also giving it a reason. Those little tips and tricks as well. Even just sort of connecting with your neighbors. It's good for you. It's good to go out for a little walk, meet your local friends, have a chat and these things Help keep along alive but bringing you back to that purpose Intentionality Last year I did a lot of public speaking about Petals. I wrote and made a lot of content. I also want to do that again this year, but I don't want to just do it for the sake of it. I want to do it for the right reasons. You know, I've set out some of my goals for this year, which is to relaunch the Petals web app. I want to get some other organizations using it, but I also want to get some results out of it. Yesterday I was thinking about machine learning and how we could use LLM to do some analysis across the industry, which would be amazing. Goal to reach Moonshot goal, which again talked about in the past. Put a link in the show notes. I want to make sure that these sort of factors are coming into any public speaking gigs. There's a few conferences that are putting out calls, talks at the moment that I want to put in for, but I want to get the right message across, make sure I'm doing it for the right reasons. They've got the right audience, I know that for sure. And these are full conferences, not just meetups and local community events. So people are paying for this content. They want to make sure that they're getting value out of it and quite frankly, a little bit of imposter syndrome because current lineup already are much higher levels than me. But I don't want to use that against I just want to use that to my advantage as well. So yeah, this week is all about purpose, focus. I've been getting quite productive with content. I put a bit of a content plan around my year to align all my goals not just with Petals, but with the house music podcast. I'm recording an interview today with one of my long favorite artists, which will.

Be fun, and we're getting a calendar.

Around that with some guest DJs, we're getting some other reputable names to join the conversation. And I'm also thinking about how I can restructure the podcast into two different forms along with newsletters and all that sort of things as well. So it's been quite a productive week. I've managed to get a content calendar together. I've organized it for the team, the relevant teams to see that as well, and I'm getting the conversation flowing. I've also been trying to get a better balance of what makes me happy. Again, part of the ikegai logic was make time for those things that make you happy. Listen to music or anything that is calming. That's not A distraction in today's modern society. And whilst I like to make the most of my morning walks with a dog by listening to some educational content or some podcasts, I do find I'm just doing it for the sake of it, not just for personal joy. I'm always trying to think of what else is that? What is that? I need to enjoy my walks as well. So what I've started to do now is give myself a blink. It's one of the blinkest audiobooks. Once that's finished, music time. Got a Spotify playlist I can use to just relax and taking the walk. Obviously doing this audio content is not the same, but I really like the fact I've got a good balance. It's about 20 minutes of education, learning, enjoyable learning, and then 20 minutes, half an hour of just music and escapism. Again, nice little trick I'd recommend anyone to try. Another thing that's been quite enjoyable to see this week is the reactivation of enthusiasm in one of my side project communities on the side. You can tell it's at the start of the new year when people start getting ideas about what they could do for their little side projects. So our community on the side, there's been a few people dropping in this week that have not been there for a while, which I love to see. And I've asked the question, what are your goals for this year? What are you thinking of playing around with? I don't make it too formal, but what ideas have you got? And again, it's quite cool to see the response. Some people are playing around with habit tracking and health data. Some people are looking at like just making content hobbies, you know, musicians, you've got illustrators, you've got a range of things like that. But for me it's just great to see this newfound enthusiasm. But what is it about the start of the year when we do this? Why doesn't it last any longer than a few months? Generally for me, this is why I set the community up. I want to try and encourage people to keep and sustain that enthusiasm. So I need to think about more creative ways of getting the community involved and thinking about how they're going to get their little sub project lives. That was the original purpose of this community. Everyone comes up with great ideas, but they never see it through. They get bored, hit the 90 mark and I'm like, get it live, push it live, ship it. So I'm just working out how we can get the team behind that. I'd love to have a chat with them all. But again, the nature of how we work and being very casual, hobby focused, community. There's no real good time when everyone's available. Tried in a lot of evenings. Again, very limited. A lot of these people are parents as well, so. And even with young children, so it's difficult to plan around that. I need some ideas. I need. I need to get these people enjoying their side projects and sharing their what they've made. It's all about the fun part for me. It's not necessarily for business or career or professional. That can wait. This is hobbies. It's fun is off the back of a lockdown that completely threw out all our habits and things are starting to settle down a bit more now and I really want to keep that momentum going. What's this, babe? There's another side goal for me. I'm wrapping them up, keeping that community active. How does all this relate to Petals then? What I'm trying to get across here, all the little examples of how all the factors of productivity, being productive, getting things done, overlaps with things like enjoying yourself, working with others in teamwork, learning stuff, but also keeping that balance of serenity. That's the petals factors and that's why they're so important to the things I do. These are things. These are self identified metrics I came up with three years ago now and I've regularly tracked and reviewed and adjusted. This is the key points. Petals as well. Don't just take a metric for the sake of it, do something about it. I want to be enjoying myself while I make content and learning stuff in the process. But working with other people, all those factors are in there. And this is why I wanted to highlight this week how I'm finding my new rhythm for 2025 and how you could do the same. It.