It’s coming to the end of the year. Time to retreat and reflect. And something wise came along today to nudge me along:

I thought 2020 would be the year I got everything I wanted. Now I know 2020 is the year I appreciate everything I have.

Indeed.

I started off the year feeling extremely optimistic and ambitious. Lots of plans – learning code, creating my own SaaS, reading lots of books about millionaires. I even had a bold, moonshot goal to get to $1mil annual revenue! I was riding off on the momentum from 2019, and 2020 felt like it was going to be the year where I finally achieved everything I had set out to do. 

Then COVID happened. 

All plans out of the window. Momentum lost. Motivation dried up. But the universe has a funny—almost tragic-comic—way of giving you what you wanted in a roundabout way. A way that’s actually better for you. By not being able to travel, we’re now becoming travelers in our own country, discovering new places and rediscovering old ones with fresh eyes. By having to stay home, we learned to spend more quality family time together. By not being able to eat at nice restaurants due to safe distancing, we got back to eating clean at home. The loss of the old normal, all the many past ‘distractions’—travel, malls, food—only paved the way to the realisation that actually, I don’t need all that much. 

So in a way, 2020 did give me everything, in a different perspective. By trimming off the fluff, to get to the essentials. 

Just stuff I needed, not what I wanted.