I’ve been feeling self-imposed pressure to write the quintessential End of the Year Blog Post — astute and moving, witty and full of realness.

But I haven’t yet fully processed the depth and breadth of this past year and all it taught me. I’m waiting on alchemy to turn up what it will. Meanwhile, I’m returning to my original idea for this post, which is a catalogue of stuff that made my business and life a more excellent experience this year.

Software & Apps

• Asana for individual and team To Dos and project management. Simple, lightweight, flexible — love.
• PandoraOne plus Jambox turns my living room into a café where the playlist is always of my choosing. My (very different) go-to stations: Brandi Carlile and Gotan Project
• InstaGram with Aviary and Over — lots of lighting options and color effects, plus typography for days; PicMonkey Royale for online photo editing
• Goodreads for sharing book ratings and reviews with friends

Goodies

• Story is a State of Mind with Sarah Selecky — incredibly elegant ecosystem for short story writing [affiliate link]
• For gifts, home decor sundries, and inspired browsing, Free People, Terrain, and Mothology (a vendor I used to buy a lot from when I owned my boutique).
• The best paper planner ever, by Laurel Denise. I swear it’s set up to work with the INFJ brain.

Books

• Liz Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things is about following our passions and obsessions and creating legacy, all wrapped in a rollicking ride through history. Incredible. Breathtaking.
• Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, about a group of talented teens who find fervent friendship at a summer camp for artistically gifted kids, and what happens to them over time, as stars rise and fortunes take shape
• Susan Choi’s My Education, about a precocious graduate student who falls for her charismatic professor and his temperamental, alluring wife
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, about a beautiful and manipulative married couple with . . . problems
• Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind, part of the 99U Book Series — essays on getting your best creative work done, efficiently and elegantly

 Ideas

• Everything happens from the inside out. This is not new news, to me or to you, but this year I’ve really lived into the concept of transformation originating from the base up, from the core outward. Just like we wouldn’t slap together a visual brand identity for you out of pet fonts and a “good enough” color palette, true reinvention starts with recognizing why something matters.

• Mastery is important, but not at the expense of experimentation. I used to be all ‘mastery first’ — actually getting pissed at people with the gall to launch business coaching brands without themselves ever having run a successful business. (I still don’t like this idea.) But this year, I’ve seen the beauty in experimentation, innovation, and boldly going where YOU have never gone before.

• Priorities create pressure; beloved work deserves equal weight. For many years, I’ve suppressed my desire to write and publish fiction because it wasn’t imminently for-pay. So I prioritized my business growth and development over everything else — self-care, relationships, even sleep. But just in the past couple months, I’ve started treating my fiction writing practice as equally important as working on and in my for-pay business. My fiction pursuits are currently private and thrilling: there’s no blog, no social media presence, etc. I’m not interested in going there anytime soon. For now, it’s just me and a black-covered Mead Five Star spiral bound notebook (the kind with perforated pages for clean tear-outs) and a good pen. Heaven. Suddenly, my for-pay work is getting done better and easier, too.

• As you (I) niche in to any passion/interest/pursuit/obsession, everything opens up. I don’t why this is so, but it’s so. This is one of the guiding philosophies for The Voice Bureau‘s work in 2014. Likely, you’ll see less scope on our website, more clarity and depth, and more accessibility for everyone who’s eager to come with us on this journey into Voice Values, brand voice, and the mindsets and skillsets needed to develop an emotionally competent business brand with a personal feel in the digital age. Wow. Here we go.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

What’s your favorite find, in any category, for 2013?