Daily Routine

Hey team, so here we are. It is Wednesday, and it is the end of November. Can you believe it? We only have just a few more days, and we’re marching right into the end of the year.

I don’t know about you, but this time, this last quarter is a big deal for Karen and me and our family. Karen and I’s 30th anniversary just happened. Thanksgiving just happened. Jonathan’s birthday just happened. The Marine Corps Birthday just happened. Veterans Day just happened. David’s birthday just happened. And Halloween just happened.

And here we are, marching really fast headlong right into our Christmas parties in just the next few days. In the next 10, 12, 15 days, we’ll have both Christmas parties. We’re wrapping those up. Then it’ll be Christmas, and then it’ll be New Year’s.

I don’t know about you, but I seem to think about the fact that it’s also been budget season. We’re preparing for the end of the year and preparing for next year, thinking about what we’re going to do in 2024. So our minds have been consumed with all those things, and I’m imagining your family is no different. You’ve got a lot of things going on. Hopefully, you don’t have an anniversary and two kids’ birthdays to wrap up in all of those other holidays and things that are going on.

But some of you probably know a little bit of what I’m feeling. Now, let me share with you something John Maxwell said. He said, “You’ll never change your life until you change something that you do daily. The secret of success is found in your daily routine.” That’s John Maxwell: your daily routine.

Sometimes, our daily routine seems to be overpowered with all of these things like parties and all this different stuff, and it’s hard to stay focused on a daily routine and what you’re doing.

Sometimes, we might be spending too much time on the Nintendo or on the Playstation or whatever it is. I know I’ve been working with my boys on the same subject. Same as me, working really hard at explaining to them. Jonathan, over this last summer, has learned that if he just reads anywhere from 8 to 10 pages a day, he reads a book a week because most of his books are right around 110, 108 pages. So he’s able to read in right around a week’s time frame a book every week, and he’s accomplishing lots of different things.

So, I’m instilling these disciplines into him for the same reason. I’ve told this to our leadership class many, many times: that if you just read somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 pages a day, you’ll read a 300-page book by the end of the month. You could read 12 books a month, 12 books a year.

Many of us don’t read very many books at all. I know I read a lot more than I’ve ever read in my entire life because I realize that I need to stay above, and if I want to change my life, then I need to change my daily routine and focus on my daily routine and what I put into my mind, what I put into my thoughts, into my actions.

I need to put time and effort into doing those things well.

So, as you prepare for this month of December and Christmas and your New Year’s resolutions that might be coming up, I want you to think about how can you be more valuable to yourself, right? We say be valuable because nothing less will do it. It starts with us. Be valuable to yourself. Invest in you. Invest time in yourself. Instead of turning on and binge-watching another episode of Grey’s Anatomy or whatever it is you do, spend an extra 20, 30 minutes a day reading 10 pages, and imagine what will happen if you invest in yourself. That’s valuable.

All right, God bless you guys. I’ll see you next week.