We Made It: Thoughts On Completing A Year (And Gearing Up For Another One) Let's go into 2021 with the knowledge that we've made the best out of the cards we were dealt with- and that if we need to do, we'll do so again.

Given that we are coming to the end of 2020, I took some time the other day to take stock of how I personally went through the course of this year. I soon found myself feeling sorry about all of the things that didn't go according to my plans for it, be it with the goals I had personally made for myself, or even just the deliverables that are usually expected from me as part of my job.

For instance, looking at the latter, it was quite depressing to realize that I wasn't able to work with my team to stage any of BIZ Experiences Middle East's forums this year. These events usually offer us some of the best opportunities to commune and collaborate with BIZ Experiencess, investors, and entities from across our region's business ecosystem. It's thinking about things like these that happened over the last 12 months that soon led to a feeling of inadequacy descend on me- the thought process in my head was that I should have probably done something more to make these goals I had envisioned happen.

At this point though, my journalistic tendency to look at both sides of a story before deciding on a course of action set in, and that's how I figured it was only fair to see how much of a balance was there between what I thought I had missed out on over the last year, with whatever I was actually able to accomplish this year. And that did make me judge myself a little less- to go back to the previous example, while we at BIZ Experiences may not have been able to do any in-person conferences, we sure managed to stage quite a lot of virtual forums that had the same community-building ethos as that of our physical ones.

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Indeed, it's by continuing on this exercise that I began to realize that while 2020 did afford me a lot of setbacks and losses to feel disappointed about, there were also quite a number of things that I managed to achieve and accomplish in the year, despite everything that happened through the course of it.

Now, I am sharing all of this here because I've come across quite a few people -many of whom are BIZ Experiencess, incidentally- who, besides beating themselves up for how 2020 went for them, are also eager to dismiss the year as having been nothing more than an absolute failure for them. For those of you feel the same way, I'd suggest you too take the time out to do the exercise that I did- and yes, this applies to even those among you who have gone through what you might consider your career's (or life's) absolute lows.

After all, while the concept of resilience has got a bit of a negative rap around it in the recent past, I believe that one can still be proud about making it through what has been a severely debilitating period. As such, let's go into 2021 with the knowledge that we've made the best out of the cards we were dealt with- and that if we need to do, we'll do so again.

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