How to become master of the universe in 2025
Time to bring the She-Ra t-shirt back into rotation.
It’s 2025 now and my social feeds are filled with folks sharing their:
Resolutions (“I know I’ve never been able to fulfill them before, but this year my resolution is to keep my resolution”)
Word of the year (Can my word please be “sammich”?)
What’s In/What’s Out list (what happens when those of us who read Seventeen magazine become “influencers” as adults)
Contrary to the negativity and abysmal statistics around launching into “new year, new you” every January 1st, it also is a really great time to start. There’s something about the fresh beginning of a new calendar year that makes change feel possible. And as I dove headfirst into the audiobook of Katy Milkman’s How to Change, her research supported this much-needed mindset shift. New beginnings to the day, week, month or year are great for new beginnings.
Doing things a little differently
My absolute favorite thing to do at the start of the year is to grab my oracle decks, my journal and my favorite pen, throw open the curtains like I’m Princess Anna from Frozen on coronation day, and let Florida’s morning sunshine flood my office. While the tiny retired CPA that still lives inside of me shakes it’s head at my woo-ness, my big ol’ woo self surrounds myself in cards and light to spiritually plan my year ahead. Each month gets it’s own card pull along with the “divine download” interpretation of what it may mean.
But even before the monthly card pulls start a-pullin’, I do one very important pull. I grab my Goddess Power deck from my Hay House auntie, Colette Baron Reid, and determine what goddess energy will be my over-arching guide for the year.
One year it was Aphrodite, the goddess of love. That was the year Jen and I got engaged… not because the card made me do it, but because it was absolutely the right time for it. Another year it was Hestia, the goddess of home. That year I handled some much-needed remodeling that I had been avoiding, and Jen became co-owner, and we paid off our mortgage.
Last year it was Mnemosyne, the goddess of The Past. It meant working through old triggers and traumas. It meant taking charge of my own life and acting out of my own self interest rather than fear. It was the year I left my full-time corporate writing job in the summer for a chance at the unknown. While it didn’t go as I planned, it was absolutely the right move and paid off by year-end in the form of new writing opportunities. Last year was also the year that old family drama decided to take center stage like some angry goat on a roof. I handled it differently this time.
In each of these goddess card pulls, I don’t ever have an idea of how things will actually play out. I just accept the energy of the year and then things and stuff happen… often in the fall months.
This year’s goddess energy was one that left me feeling slightly excited and slightly like I wanted to slide the card back into the deck and pretend like it was a mis-pull. I got Saraswati, the goddess of mastery.
She-Ra powers engaged
What was my deal with not wanting mastery? Well, mastery feels both hard and impossible. Maybe it’s because I’m an Aries. Maybe it’s because I can’t half-ass anything and find the exhausting desire to whole-ass everything. Either way, my first Google search was for PhD programs at Cornell in creative writing.
After all, if I’m going to be a master of my writing craft, I must need a piece of paper to say I am, right? While also excluding the 262 pieces of paper that make up my Hay House memoir, Perfect Queer, right? Or ignoring the countless stories, articles, speeches and books I’ve written and ghostwritten over the years, right?
What the heck is a master of anything? What does a master look like? How do they spend their days? What do they do? What kind of sammiches do they eat? Clearly, I had some exploring to do.
My woo-called life
What I find exceptionally cool about my life is that whenever I put a call out to the universe now, I get answers. Pretty quickly too. The first came in the form of the Afford Anything podcast episode with Dr. Cal Newport discussing “A No Pressure Plan for Next Year’s Resolutions.” Newport connected the dots between Marie Curie, Einstein, and Lin Manuel-Miranda in how they work and achieve success. As three people who would all be considered masters in their field, I wanted to know the secret sauce. Newport shares that they achieved it through a process he calls “slow productivity.”
While I encourage you to listen to the episode for all the fascinating stories, slow productivity can be summed up as this: do fewer things, work at a natural pace, obsess over quality.
Neat. Okay. Can do. I certainly don’t want to work more and I excel at obsessing.
The next syncronistic happening occurred whilst Jen and I were painting our bedroom a color that I have obsessed about for months. (It’s Retreat from Sherwin Williams and you can find it in the background of the Saraswati picture. You’re welcome in advance).
As I painted, I listened to the audiobook Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. Would I recommend it? Meh. Did I absolutely love hearing the stories of sushi master, Jiro Ono, and master ceramic artist, Yukio Shakunaga? Absolutely. I was inspired by their approaches to mastery and extra excited that their approach, too, seemed to mirror the tenants of slow productivity.
Mastering mastery and sammichry
When it comes to writing, I care about my craft. I care more about the quality of my words more than I have ever cared about any other work I’ve done. I care about the emotional pull (whether tears, eye-rolls, or hearty laughs) that my stories can create. I envision you reading and want to make sure I am providing value for your time.
I write and thinking about stories to share all the time. I publish what I write some of the time. I’m not a master, but I am stoked about exploring the path of mastery because it is my life’s desire to continually learn and improve at this work.
Mastery isn’t necessarily the resume or the degree. It’s also not about success in all things or working 80+ hour weeks so that you can brag to your friends at happy hour about how hard you work (I see you smirking in there, little retired CPA self).
My mastery this year is going to have to include mistakes and failures. It will also require consistent action, persistence, and intentionality. It’s about showing up to write, butt-in-chair approach, even when I’m not feeling like it. It’s also about not writing all the time, because my creative brain needs to work the way it works, and not according to the western industrial revolution time schedule.
Join me on my journey
I hope you will join me in exploring and celebrating my never-ending work toward mastery as I go live on Instagram every Monday and Wednesday at 8:30am ET for co-writing/co-working time.
For the first 15 minutes we chat and I share tips and stories to help you in your creative journey. Then we spend the next 45 minutes working on whatever we need to work on. I don’t interact with the camera or read comments, and you get the most boring IG live ever as you look at your screen and see me click-clacking away at my keyboard at whatever project I’m working on. But we’re each other’s coworkers and we’re working together toward whatever we’re hoping to accomplish in this wild year ahead.
Happy 2025, my friends! I hope that whatever you desire for this year that you experience joy in the process rather than the outcome and that you become an endless fountain of infinite hope at what you can achieve.
I love you. I love me. Let’s do this.
Drop a comment below if you want me to pull a goddess energy card for you!
When I was much younger, I heard an author interviewed (I've long since forgotten her name and/or work) and she said one thing which stuck with me: she said that the older she got, and the more she wrote, the more difficult writing was for her, as she had reached a level where choosing every word, and crafting every sentence had become painstaking. Now that I actually am older, I absolutely relate. In a lot of ways, I miss the ability to simply express my ideas by mindlessly barfing up thousands of words of plain prose without consulting a thesaurus or obsessing over punctuation, for no better reason than I was able to express so many more ideas that way. Sometimes I think my path to becoming a better writer is to stop trying to write well.
I want to thank you for the writing mornings! They have been hugely helpful to me in getting my flow back. As I mentioned this morning, my 2025 is about Intentions. I also wrote about it on Monday on my Substack post!