I’ve just turned 30.

And Andrew Dubber convinced Pete Ashton to interview me on the subject on camera at a friends-over-for-lunch party I had today. We only seemed to get through about 10% of the things that I’m actually feeling about being thirty, but the experience of being filmed seems to focus my mind… In the video: motivations, goals, the problems of mentoring, micro or distributed mentoring, and a bunch of other ideas and self analysis on turning thirty.

Trigaphobia
Despite spending the year avoiding the issue of my impending age change, I am now no longer suffering from “Trigaphobia” - the fear of turning thirty (Why? Triginta = ‘30′ in latin, which as a prefix is Triga, add on ‘phobia’. Perhaps ‘Trigophobia’?).

Today I am suddenly surprised with myself for not feeling the slightest numeric nostalgia, but I am looking back at the last decade and thinking ‘what was all that about?’, so this is an attempt to collate a few of my thoughts on the subject of turning thirty.

I guess I’m feeling a few things at once:

• Liberation (no more ‘he’s done blah blah and he’s still in his twenties’…)
• Disappointment (I didn’t focus enough to make a million by thirty. D’oh!)
• Like I’m ‘Rueing the day’ (There’s a bunch of unfinished ‘things to do before thirty’ - I guess they stay that way.
• Less like I am looking back
• More like I am looking ahead
• A sense of renewed opportunity
• More relaxed
• Positive
• Like this is a new start
• Like an ‘adult’ at last
• Like I’m blagging the ‘adult’ and ‘dad’ tags even more now

I’ve also had the strong urge to write down some kind of timeline for what actually happened in my life over the last ten years. It sounded simple but after about three items in a list I realised the scope of the idea. Another post perhaps.

This isn’t how I thought it would feel

There are so many horror stories of people going into fits of depression, of them avoiding the subject of their impending birthday, of a people purposefully having a succession of 29th birthdays, and so on.

I’m quite confused where this comes from, because after the assumed cultural pressure surrounding ‘ooh it’s the big three oh - that’s the end of your youth then’ jokes, the punchline just doesn’t work.

It’s good. I like it. I’m feeling good, things are going pretty well and if anything I’m feeling like I’ve just gone through a life spring-clean of sorts.

Throwing Unparties

Setting aside today’s positivity, it’s useful to note that for the past few months Emily has been badgering me to sort out an answer to the question ‘what are you doing for your birthday?’

To be honest I’ve been burying my head in the sand in an attempt to ignore the issue.

Procrastination has been my tool of choice, which was pretty effective. But as the date approached I realised it would actually be quite nice to mark the day in some way.

Throwing a big party just didn’t feel appropriate. You end up drunk, with a hangover the next day, you hardly get to speak to anyone you’ve invited and more often than not (if you are me) do something embarrassing.

So instead I’m going to spend a while throwing a series of ‘unparties’.

It started with Emily organising a break to the Cotswolds the other week, and today followed by an impromptu (three days ‘can you make it’ invite) lunch where we cooked roast beef and nice veggie stuff.

The idea is - I just want to spend some good times with good people, and the appropriate way for me to do it is to collect smaller groups of people together for some ’small child friendly’ type events and maybe the occasional weekend away.

I’m not going to be so self involved as to call all of these parties, so ‘unparties’ seems appropriate and have more to do with just meeting up with people for interesting conversation than an evening of boozing or a big event where I would get to spend a minute with everyone. And it means I get to spread it out for a while. And perhaps even this could extend into my having more of a home-based social life, which I think could only be a good thing. At the moment I seem to socialise mainly at events in the city - I’d like to change that.

I mentioned in the video I’ve had some exciting news about a new project. I’ll post more on that soon.

As John Mostyn said to me today. “The next decade is going to be great”.

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