New Year's Wishes

I found an old diary once with a list of new year’s wishes. At the top of the page it said ‘No more problems with my Italian backers.’ Not long after writing the list, the backers went bust. It was not the solution I imagined at all, but I soon realised it was the only solution. There are certain special reservoirs of hell that are particular to the fashion business and the designer/investor relationship: one of you isn’t doing well and the other party is the blamer. This particular combo was that neither of us was doing well and the accusations and absurd suggestions became more and more farfetched. Mine was ‘Can’t you pay me on time so that my cash flow doesn’t go haywire?’ Theirs was ‘If you got an answering machine you wouldn’t need an assistant and you could save money.’ This year I have no wishes and resolutions. I like to be ahead of the game so I hate to wait for January 1 st when I can’t do much about anything. Most of my wishes and goals also involve being terrified on some level. These ambitions have to be approached way before D Day. Once I light on an idea I want to pursue, some action needs to be taken. Then the deferral starts, what can I do to not do this? Sometimes I indulge this for a bit – it used to be weeks, sometimes even months but now it might be an hour or two as I know the longer I take the more it will undermine how my ideas might link together. The sooner I start, the sooner I come up against the obstacles - and this is when I start to know how to make something work. I used to rely on the build up of no strategy to produce an explosion of adrenaline - driven outcome. This often worked quite well but it didn’t leave me confident that I had had anything much to do with its success. It was more of a narrow escape leaving me anxious and demoralised that it was only possible to achieve anything through fear. Now my strategy is to pre-empt my fear. I am getting to know myself better and it’s more fun.