Did you know that Kate Bush was only 19 when she embarked on her first solo tour of the UK? Not only had she been writing music from a very young age but at that point she had been working on some of the songs on her first album "The Kick Inside" for more than four years. Clearly even at 19 she is a driven person and has been from a while - creating and forming the world around her as she goes - a force of nature.

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How do we choose to impose ourselves on the world? As we head to the end of another year it's easy to collapse into a familiar cycle of overindulgence, putting the last year to bed and gathering strength for the next one. As the years roll by though, we can also learn from the past and understand earlier what it is we would like to do next.

Over the last three years I've published about 250 articles and occasionally generated some and discussion online, mainly around what books I've been reading, or what conference I'm going to be speaking at or what engineering approach I'm taking. For me, none of these activities were truly creative activities, they were just probing, sensing and compiling activities.

In other words, I was looking for something.

These actions helped me make sense of the world around me rather than making strides to change it. I could write a blog to summarise a thought, or pitch a talk to hone my ideas. But then I got bored of writing for the sake of it and talking for the sake of it.

In the huge industry that has grown around tech conferences and tech publishing, there is increasingly an echo chamber of ideas; a reverberation of thoughts. Few original ideas come out of it because the business world is cautious. Publishers are cautious. Even the most innovative ideas end up aping the thing they are supposed to replace because people in our industry only understand the groundswell, the earth moving under them in the form of hiring/firing/retiring. Conservatism rules. Money rules. Look at all inevitability of AI and LLM discussions.

Indeed AI and LLM and even RAGs are just ways of rehashing old ideas. There is no true creative leap.

So as an engineer, as a leader, what is important to focus on in 2025? We are almost a quarter of a way through the 21st Century. What have you accomplished in that time?

Rather than reading a book, or attending a conference, or doing another training - what about just focussing on a handful of actionable things:

1. Take a risk on something.
2. Create something new.
3. Building something different.
4. Above all being kind to people.

This echos some great advice I stumbled on in BlueSky the other day:

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So whatever 2025 brings, follow your dreams, not what you're told you should be thinking about. And I wish you the very best of luck!

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