The first month of 2025 has felt like a decade, and while we originally planned on posting this blog a couple weeks ago, talking about the science of fresh starts was about as tone deaf as a seagull considering everyone in Los Angeles knows at least one family displaced, and those of us who live or have lived in the San Gabriel Valley or Palisades know many, including some coworkers. That said, this still holds true, so we decided to post it.
As crazy as it is to think about, we’re already through a quarter of the century that many of us clearly remember just rolling into. Many of us, apparently, are also old. Once those signs that broadcast the year of birth to legally drink rolled over into the Bush era, the truth of our age became acute, in between bouts of our backs and joints reminding us. However, even for us elder Millenial, Gen X types that the people who decide generations can’t seem to decide what we’re part of, a new year represents a fresh start, even if we’re dragging our old bones and baggage to the starting line.
Fortunately, De-Fi is much younger than me, and the baggage we’re carrying is good. We have a strong origin as part of Output, and a strong reason for breaking out of Output so we could focus on what we’re good at, while Output focuses on what they’re good at. You can’t really subscribe to a desk, any more than you could be able to perpetually buy content, so here we are.
2025 represents the starting line to a fresh new business. 2024 was a lot about fulfilling the pent up demand from our production shutdown in 2023 and reestablishing our ability to make good stuff for our customers. We’re through that now, and clear eyed looking at an ability to always have product in stock, or shortly in stock, something we’ve always struggled with going back to our Output days. With that milestone finally achieved, we have the bandwidth to grow the product line with more complimentary solutions to what we currently offer. It’s an exciting time. We've built the foundation for a fresh start.
I’ll admit that I’m a bit skeptical about new years resolutions and pigeonholing starts into a calendar that’s based on the movement of planetary bodies, because if you want to do something, why not just do it, but it turns out I’m wrong. In a 2015 study published in Psychological Science, researchers asked participants to sign up for email reminders of their goals. Some were given arbitrary dates, say, like tomorrow, and others were given landmark dates, like New Years, or the first day of Spring.
Participants who were giving a landmark date were significantly more likely to start and continue a new goal. Psychologists call it the “fresh start effect.” Landmarks tend to separate the passage of time and reset new ‘mental accounting’ periods, putting the past behind to make an aspirational future seem more likely.
To quote the study:
We present causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark denoting the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.
Put another way, we really do believe the cliche, new year, new me.
It’s a new year, we have a fresh start--lean into it. Let’s make the best of it, and we’ll do our best to keep making the gear to help you make it happen.
