Work & Achievement · A Decembers list
Every business you ever started, run, or walked away from
The lemonade stand that made four dollars on a hot Saturday. The lawn-mowing crew of neighborhood kids you bossed around at twelve. The one with a real lease and a real payroll that kept you up at night.
This is where they go, one at a time. A line for the ones that fizzled, a paragraph for the one you'd do all over again.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Write down the name you painted on that first sign, and the whole thing comes back — the smell of the shop, the first customer, the check that bounced.
The tax returns say a business existed from one year to another. They don't say you named it after your grandfather, or that the first customer walked in by mistake looking for the barber next door and bought something anyway. They don't record the night you sat at the kitchen table doing the numbers by hand and decided to keep going. Nobody files paperwork on the moment you knew it would work, or the moment you knew it wouldn't.
You'll never sit down and write the whole memoir of your working life — it's too big, and you'd never know where to start. But you can write down one business tonight: what it was, why you started instead of just talking about it, the one customer who still makes you laugh. Tomorrow another. That's how the record gets made, a line at a time, until your kids finally understand what all those years were actually about.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The ventures that end up here
The childhood hustles
The paper route, the lemonade stand, the snow you shoveled for a dollar a driveway. Half of what you know about money and people you learned before you were fifteen, standing on somebody's porch waiting to get paid.
The side things that never quit
The weekend business you swore was temporary and ran for eleven years. The eBay habit, the flea-market booth, the thing you did after your regular job because you couldn't help yourself. It paid for a vacation once, or a car, or nothing at all.
The real one
The venture with a lease, a phone line, and your name on the loan. The one that meant a payroll to make and employees who called you boss. Whether it made you rich, broke, or just tired, it changed how you see everything since.
By the shape it took
- Kid ventures
- Paper routes, mowing lawns, and lemonade stands — the ones where getting paid in quarters felt like a fortune.
- Side hustles
- The weekend and evening operations run out of a garage, a spare room, or the trunk of your car.
- Partnerships
- The ones you started with a friend, a spouse, or a brother-in-law — and what that did to the friendship.
- Storefronts
- The businesses with a public door, a sign out front, and rent due on the first of every month.
- The ones that folded
- The ventures that ran out of money, customers, or steam — and taught you more than the ones that worked.
- Sold or handed off
- The businesses you passed to a buyer, a child, or an employee, and what it felt like to let go.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A record of every time you decided to try it yourself
Start with the first one — the route, the stand, the shop. Put down its name and what the first day looked like, and the rest will follow.