Expect nothing

About this time every year, we sketch out the work we expect over the next 12 months. The exercise is valuable. The projection itself...not so much.

When we look back at the previous year’s forecast, the main thing we notice is how much we didn’t see coming. Projects we expected never happened. Longtime clients developed new campaigns. Brand-new clients asked us to help with jobs we couldn’t have imagined.

The inaccuracy of our year-end projections used to bother us. It doesn’t anymore. We’ve come to see our forecasts not as a rigid expression of the future we expect, but as a flexible plan. In writing terms, our projections are an outline for the coming year.

Peter Matthiessen’s classic book The Snow Leopard describes his pilgrimage through the Himalayas. Before leaving America, Matthiessen visits his Zen teacher, who sends him off with a clap on the back and the exhortation “Expect nothing!”

We think that’s good advice for writers. When writers work with a flexible plan rather than toward a set result, they’re alive to the possibilities presented by each interview, sentence and revision. Those moments can spur some of our best work and some of our most rewarding collaborations with our clients.

For that matter, “Expect nothing!” seems like good advice for anyone, especially as holiday stress ratchets up. In a lovely little Christmas book called The Gift of Nothing, a cat named Mooch looks desperately for a gift for Earl, a dog who has everything (chew toy, dog bed, food bowl). Mooch ultimately gives Earl an empty box—and this gift of nothing frees the best friends to appreciate each other and everything in the world around them.

We hope you’ll find that kind of peace this holiday season. Thank you for being part of our community. We look forward to entering 2020 together, whatever it holds.