How about you? What advice would you give to your younger self?

5. Expand Your Circle: Surround yourself with thinkers who challenge, inspire, and uplift you. The company you keep defines the heights you’ll reach.

4. Seek Discomfort: Growth lives outside your comfort zone. Stretch into the unfamiliar—it’s where your potential gets activated. Courage is a muscle; train it.

3. Build Daily Habits: Growth is in the micro, not the macro. Consistency trumps intensity. Commit to small, meaningful actions that compound over time.

2. Own Your Story: Reflect, don’t dwell. Your past is a lesson, not a limit. Step into the new year with clarity about what you stand for and where you're heading.

1. Embrace Curiosity: Every challenge hides a lesson. Approach 2025 with the mindset of a learner, not a knower. Growth begins where certainty ends.

Wait, that sound fire actually

unless we see the light of God clearly, what we call light is actually darkness: “how great is that darkness!” (Matt. 6:23). Advent bids us take a fearless inventory of the darkness: the darkness without and the darkness within.”

-Fleming Rutledge, Advent

does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness. As our Lord Jesus tells us,

I usually make it for our family, but ran out of time this year. My wife took over, did the same as you, and everyone is saying how good it is. And I’m completely fin if she takes over from now on

You guys look like you just cracked the case

That pic goes hard

But it leads to the true path of happiness and fulfillment. And truly being useful to those who come after us.

But there is a jump we can make, if we have the courage to do so. It means leaving behind what is familiar, how we’ve previously defined success, and caring about what others think of us.

It means being broken and emptied. It’s what Jesus called death to self.