Why your best chapter starts now
Stop reviewing the index of last year and start drafting the pages you've left blank.
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE #280
You may not understand this just yet, but your best chapter begins now.
Although you’re reading this in January, you’re more likely to still be thinking in terms of the waning light of December. Which means you’re probably doing what most of us do in this season: reviewing the index of what’s been and gone.
You’re scrolling through the mental catalogue of your year. The launched projects (and the abandoned ones). The numbers and goals you hit; the engagements you missed. The personal resolutions that, by March, felt like vague suggestions from a past self you no longer recognise.
You’re tallying wins, nursing regrets, and constructing a narrative of the last twelve months that’s either a triumphant highlight reel or a prosecutorial dossier.
Mostly, it’s a messy mix of both.
This review though is a form of creative procrastination. It’s not authorship, it’s management and damage limitation. Instead of writing the new book of what’s to come, you’re organising the library of your past life.
The new year, whatever number is attached to it isn’t a distant future. It’s a blank page waiting on your desk right now.
The trouble is, and whether we admit it or not (and most of us don’t or won’t) we’re terrified of blank pages. They’re void, scary, and empty. They are intellectual and experiential deserts we’d much rather ignore.
We’d rather re-edit old chapters—polishing sentences that have already been published to the universe, underlining or highlighting this sentence here or that footnote there—we’d much rather do that than face the pristine, terrifying potential of the empty sheet before us. We confuse reflection with action, and we mistake curation with creation.
Content creators, listen up. This is our professional pathology. We are world-class index-reviewers. We can analyse our analytics, we dissect our click-through rates, and we re-watch our own performances with a critic’s cold eye. We build entire personal brands on the curated lesson learned from past endeavours. But in doing so, we are quietly being usurped by the one thing we claim to celebrate and champion: the new.
The algorithms, the audiences, the culture—they hunger for the next thing. Not the re-hashed, slightly polished version of the last thing. Your most engaged follower isn’t waiting for your “Top 5 Lessons from 2025” carousel. They’re waiting, consciously or not, for the idea you haven’t had or shared yet. They’re looking for the piece you think you’re not qualified to write (but you are), and for the project that doesn’t fit your brand but that in reality slots right into place.
That project, that piece, that idea—each one of them sits right there on the blank pages you’ve been avoiding.
Those pages have titles you’ve been scared to write down:
“The skill I thought I’d never need”
“The opinion that would alienate my core audience”
“The collaboration that feels like a reach”
“The simple, quiet idea that isn’t ‘scaleable’”
“The personal story that’s not a ‘lesson,’ just a truth”
Your best chapter isn’t the logical, incremental next step from Chapter December 20XX.
Your best chapter is the unexpected left-turn ahead. The eyebrow raising genre-breaker. The one that starts with a sentence that surprises even you.
So, here is your only instruction for this moment, from one recovering index-reviewer to another:
Close the catalogue. Open the notebook.
Stop trying to write a better ending to last year. Start writing a messy, courageous, flawed, and alive beginning this year. Today. Not January 1st. Today.
Draft the proposal that’s been humming in your head for weeks or months.
Sketch the first frame of the comic book you’ve envisioned for the last five years.
Write the raw, un-optimised opening paragraph of that essay or article.
Record the voice note outlining the podcast that doesn’t sound like anything else out there but that only you are qualified to write and present.
At this point, the quality is irrelevant, it’s the action that matters because action is everything. Right now you’re switching roles from that of archivist to that of author.
I spent the best part of 30 years working in museums, so trust me, archives are where ideas and experiences go to be forgotten—catalogued, yes, but mostly forgotten. But authorship? That’s about the future.
And if you’re stuck, don’t start with the title. Start with the simplest, truest sentence you can muster. “I’ve always wondered about…” or “What if we stopped…” or “I’m afraid to write about…”
There’s your first line. Keep going from there.
In doing so, you are asserting, through the simple act of creating a first draft, a first rough cut, or an initial recording, that your story is not behind you. It’s dead ahead of you. It’s right out there waiting for you. Your job now is to go and meet it and greet it.
One of the reasons so many people procrastinate is because they see the blank page is their enemy; it’s not. It’s the only space where true originality—clumsy, half-cocked, groundbreaking, personal originality—is ever born.
This year’s index will write itself in good time. Right now though, it has no content. It’s waiting for you to supply it. So stop reviewing. Start drafting.
The best chapter of your life doesn’t have a year stamped on it yet.
Go and write its first line.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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Next time on Shaking the Tree: The power of micro shifts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.