365) The Very End

First, watch this message from me. (If you don't have Flash 10, you can watch it in the very first panel of natalie found it.) Again, how flattering is the still image? Tried to upload it directly to Blogger, but it keeps giving me an error message. (Lesson 0.5) For the record, Tumblr is a better blogging platform than Blogger.

It's here. Number 365, the last day of The Plan. I was going to write a normal post, but there's so much to say about this project itself.

The Plan

Last April I told myself that in a year's time I would be a planner. I remember writing a note to myself in huge, all caps letters, double underlined in my journal. In a nutshell, I told myself that YOU HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN FOR YOURSELF (sounds very Captain Planet, in retrospect).

Part of what came out of that note was The Plan. I realized that while I might still be working in management, I could (and very much needed to) practice my analytic thinking and writing skills. I needed something that would push me to be more curious, to observe more, and to coherently express myself.

I'd been keeping another blog, natalie found it for over a year at that point. And while I still love it as a catch-all of things I think others should see, I would go weeks without posting anything. If I was going to blog, I needed to make a firm commitment to it (Lesson 1). I think this is true for any blog. Your commitment doesn't have to be every day, but there needs to be some sort of posting schedule to which you hold yourself.

When I started, posts could take up to a few hours to think about, craft and write. On good days I would have thought about an idea or topic throughout the day. On the bad ones, I'd get to my computer at 10:30PM with not a single meaningful thought in my head. I used to fret about shitty, short posts I pulled out of my ass. But eventually, (Lesson 2) The Plan taught me that there's good and there's bad, but in the end, it's all good as long as you just do.

Posts got easier as the year went on. I can't believe where this blog has followed me - LA, Barcelona, Seoul, Beijing & Shanghai, Palo Alto, Austin and now New York. When I started The Plan, I had no idea how much change the year would bring. In that sense, The Plan now serves as a neat little thought trajectory of the year in my life where everything changed.

Thank you

As my awkward turtle video said, THANK YOU so much for reading and for supporting this little exercise of mine. It was such an added bonus to receive comments and emails from some of you. Thank you to those who sent blog fodder - you saved my ass more than once. Thanks to the international readers - I have no idea how you found me, but your little dots on the analytics map reaffirm every day the big world outside of my little world. And thanks, Mom and Dad, for reading every day, being the best PR team ever (I have a legion of readers who are friends of my parents). Dad, thanks for being my number one spell checker.

What's next

The short answer is, I don't know. But here's what I do know:

1) The Plan was an incredible experience, and a huge part of the last year of my life. While it's gotten me to where I wanted to go (for now), I'm ready to move on to something else. So no Plan year 2 plans.

2) I do want to keep writing and blogging. Not every day, and not necessarily about what I've been covering in The Plan. I'm toying with the idea of more personal and more creative writing.

3) Whatever it is will have to push me. Maybe this means looking outside of writing, incorporating other creative media.

As you can see, there are a lot of vague question marks to address. While I'd love to continue the momentum from The Plan, I hate the idea of starting another blog just to start another blog. So I'll be taking some time to think carefully about what the next project will be. In the meantime, I'll still throw things up on natalie found it, and will be sure to update The Plan once I figure out what's next.

If you want to keep in touch in the interim, you can reach me at natalieyoungkim(at)gmail.com or peek at what I'm up to via twitter.com/natalieykim. I would love nothing more than to say hi to each and every one of you individually.

That's it for now.

Onward and thank you,
Natalie