It’s that time of year, when the world appears to slow down and reflect. Today marks the end of a decade too. And thus, the reflections take on a slightly different feel. Looking back on 10 years give us pause to see how far we’ve come and the amount of change we’ve gone through.

For me the past 10 years have been filled with more emotion than my previous decades. Holding my Mom’s hand as she died eight days before I married my amazing wife. Becoming the father of two incredible children. Before the first was born we were told he had a 50% chance of significant disability. Immediately after our second was born, my wife came close to dying in my arms due to blood loss. And learning to be a parent has been a continual emotional roller coaster ride through which I’ve learned more about myself than I realised was possible.

The past decade has also seen me complete an MBA, change jobs multiple times, travel to over 30 countries, start, scale and close various businesses & charities, bring new innovations to market, buy and sell homes, manage and lead teams, write a daily blog, create a podcast, publish a book, and many other adventures.

In the 2010s, the conversation about ‘going digital’ has dramatically changed. I remember the early years of the decade when the idea of data analytics and visualisation was unknown to most people we talked with. Now the conversation has radically changed. Various forms of social media now dominant our lives, deep fakes are reality so people don’t know what is and isn’t ‘true’. We’ve become addicted to our phones and ‘offline vacations’ have become a thing. We are more connected than 10 years ago, however it is more superficial than before resulting in a loneliness and a hunger for human connection and conversation.

And now we begin a new year, a new decade. We can shape our decade. We can shape how we show up in our relationships, our families, our communities, our work, our teams. There is no doubt it will be a digital decade, but we can choose to make it more human. The choice is up to us.

Photo by Joshua Earle