We either create a mythical balance in life for 10 years or we go through short term imbalance for three years to create our life.

What I mean by this is very clear and I'll be really straight up about it. If you've got goals in your life, you can either try to kind of get to them in 10 years but also go on holidays and also have a break and also live a balanced life and that's beautiful.

There's nothing wrong with that. All you can say I'm really going to go after my goals. I'm going to work really hard for two to three years and then I'm going to come back to balance.

Welcome to On Purpose Everyone. Today is a special episode for me. A really, really exciting episode for me. It's my birthday and I'm just so grateful that I get to spend it with all of you and I'm so happy that you've downloaded this episode to listen.

It's been an amazing journey so far. We launched on February 14th, 2019, this year of this podcast and my birthday is September. It's today. It's been an amazing, amazing few months this year, sharing this with you and this really was just an idea on my last birthday.

Every year, there's something I do on my birthday that I want to share with you because I'm guessing that a lot of you do that as well and I'm guessing that a lot of you take this time to do this on your birthday.

Every year on my birthday, I sit down to reflect on the year that has passed. How many of you do that? How many of you have done that this year? How many of you have done that for a few years?

This is a habit that I've done quite consistently because I love having milestones, I love having landmarks, I love having points of reflection.

When I lived as a monk, we were recommended to reflect every two weeks to four weeks and of course you could continue to review at the end of the year and usually we wait for things like New Year's resolutions or the New Year.

But for me, my birthday's always been a moment of deep reflection and I look at everything from the progress that's been made, the achievements, the goals that have been reached.

But most importantly, I focus on the lessons learned and let me tell you why that's so important to me.

Usually when people reflect, they think about the progress, the achievements, the goals, but for me it's so important to reflect on the lessons and this is why lessons are the only thing that we can truly take into the next year.

You don't take your achievements to the next year, you don't take your awards to the next year, you do take your progress internally to the next year but your lessons, if you learn deep powerful lessons in your life, these will last you a lifetime.

And these lessons are going to keep coming back and you're going to keep needing to bring them out and use them in different scenarios.

So if you've overcome a certain type of pain in the past, you can learn that lesson in the past and then reuse that lesson in the future.

But if you become unconscious of it, like if you're not aware of that lesson, then you have to learn it all over again.

How many times have you ever been in a situation where you feel life is teaching you the same lesson again and again and again? And that happens because we don't learn it the first time, we don't observe it the first time and we don't go deep on it the first time.

I think it's really important that we become conscious of these lessons so we can use them again for long term growth and success.

So as I was reflecting on this year, I thought I should share my 12 life lessons from the last 12 months with you.

I thought this would be the best birthday episode to do where I can share the 12 life lessons that I've learned this year.

And a lot has happened in 12 months and this is not one of the life lessons. This is just something I'm throwing out there.

So much has happened in a year way more than I could ever imagine more than I could ever have predicted.

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