As 2021 comes to a close, I have been examining my life and what to do next. I’m reading The One Thing: The Suprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. They write that when Michael Phelps was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten, the teachers told his mom that he would never be able to focus. But then they write, “Phelps became a person of selected discipline. From age 14 through the Beijing Olympics, Phelps trained seven days a week, 365 days a year. He figured that by training on Sundays he got a 52-training-day advantage on the competition. He spent up to six hours in the water each day.”
The benefit was two-fold. It added discipline and simplicity. Instead of having a to-do list of endless items, he had a success list of one item. Swimming. And it landed him with the most medals of any Olympic athlete.
Most of us are not training for the Olympics, but what is our one thing?
I have a stack of books that need to be read, so I have decided to read every morning whether it’s two pages or twenty. This will help me add knowledge and inspiration to my life.
Sometimes it seems impossible to figure out where we belong. Doing the thing we’ve been doing for years? Taking a leap and trying something new? A combination of the two?
As author Charlie Mackesy writes in The Boy, the mole, the fox and the Horse, “Always remember you matter, you’re important and you are loved, and you bring to this world things no one else can.”
Here’s to 2022. May we find our one thing, uncover our gift, and then give it away.