Having ‘nothing’ is a great gift because there is a great good to be learned in poverty, and part of that lesson is that the bounty of material wealth might be the biggest ‘nothing’ that there is.

Today is the one place where the lessons of a painful yesterday are drawn together to shape the face of a different tomorrow. And the phenomenal thing about all of that is that today happens seven days a week.

To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.

It is in the defeat that we find the ingredients for the next success.

Failure is not failure unless we fail to learn from it.

Don’t think for a moment that there’s nothing to be learned from the people who’ve failed us. For some of the greatest lessons that we’ve been granted are from those who showed us how ‘not’ to do something. And we’d be wise to remember that some of those people are us.

How we handle what’s ahead of us will be determined by what we learned from everything that’s behind us. For if we learned nothing, what’s behind us will be the exact same thing that’s in front of us.

Packaged inside of every mistake there lays a great lesson. And while I don’t want to take the mistake into the New Year, I most certainly want to take the lesson that’s packaged inside of it.

When I visit the cemetery, I walk past hundreds, possibly thousands of stories now silenced. And I know that history ‘recorded’ holds the adventures that history ‘lost’ let's slip through its fingers. And I’ve thought that I need to live a life worthy of being ‘recorded’ so that the adventure that might help another never slips through the fingers of anything.