Good morning, happy Monday & happy New Year!
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings.”
– Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher from 5th century B.C.
I hope your 2025 is off to a great start!
Next week I plan on diving into some nerdy 2024 financial analysis and providing some resources for 2025, but today I would like to talk about new beginnings.
Whenever we flip the calendar from one year to the next, it provides us with an incredible opportunity to pause, reflect, and evaluate.
Where are we? Is this where we want to be?
How did we get here? What choices were made to arrive at this destination?
Where are we going? What needs to happen for the future to look like I want it to?
One of my favorite bands is Switchfoot and one of their most famous songs from the 90s (the hay day of music in my personal opinion 😉) has the following lines:
This is your life
Are you who you wanna be?
This is your life
Is it everything you dreamed that it would be
When the world was younger
And you had everything to lose?
These are probing questions.
I have good news … Your story is not yet fully written.
For Christmas of 2023 I purchased my mom a year-long assignment called Storyworth. Every week for a year she would be prompted with a question about her childhood, her memories, her experiences, and the lessons she has learned during her 66 years on this planet. At the end of that project a book was published with her stories, and I was able to give a copy of her book to each of my siblings for Christmas last year.
My mom retired in 2024, so I thought it would be fun to give the retired teacher an assignment (payback, ya’ know 😉). The finished product is a book that I will forever cherish. There are stories I didn’t know, photos I had never seen, and insight that I don’t know that I would have ever received without her efforts on this book.
No matter if we actually have a book written, metaphorically we are all writing our story day-by-day, minute-by-minute.
What kind of story are we writing?
What kind of story do we want to write?
Some of us have lots of chapters left to write, some of us only a few, but regardless of how far we are into our story, there are blank pages ahead.
My challenge to all of us in this year ahead: fill the pages intentionally!
Invest in the relationships that matter. Prioritize the meaningful. Make decisions that a future version of yourself will be proud of making.
I am honored, humbled, and extremely grateful that you have chosen me and my incredible team to partner with you as we start 2025. I’m looking forward to seeing where the journey leads.
If there is anything we can do to support you, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Make it a great week ahead.
P.S. – In 2025 I am reading through the Bible in a year. I anticipate many lessons I will learn through this experience. I don’t know exactly what it may look like, but if you’re interested in receiving a separate email from me periodically (probably no more than weekly, but probably at least monthly) about what I learn from this experience please let me know. You can just reply to this email with “Sign me up” and I’ll compile a list of those of you interested.