Just Say "Thank You"

One who is grateful for yesterday's gift will be rewarded with another today

Yoruba Proverb

At the end of 2016 I followed the advice of one of my mentors and used a framework to set my 2017 goals and my discovery was really disturbing. The framework was based on a 30-year-old best seller (Best year yet) and takes about 3 hours to go through, for the purpose of this article I will just leave a link to some of to the framework if you are interested. If you actually go through the framework to reset your goals for 2017 (I would like to believe you have set your goals) you would be quick to discover that the first thing you will be asked to do is list all the things you are grateful for in the past year.

I am a Muslim and being thankful to Allah comes with the religious rituals, but never have I actually taken note of the blessings of 2016, I had in the last months of the year been moping over my inability to achieve many of my goals for the year and have been beating myself up badly for it, what I had not done was be thankful for all I had in the year. I started to type and tears of guilt filled my eyes, I had been an ungrateful person all year long and this I believe accounted for my inability to receive more from the universe.

It is normal for humans to forget that we have so much even when we think we have nothing, we seem to always be carried away by hubris and think we should have more, achieve more and be more even when we might have not done enough to earn it. It is a good thing to seek growth and the universe encourages us to but I believe the universe also wants us to cherish what we have, I believe the universe wants us to be thankful.

To truly be thankful, you can thank God (the universe..... whatever suits your purpose) but I encourage you to be thankful to people, I like to assume it's not only me that forgets the people that make our lives flow. Here is my challenge for you to achieve within one week of reading this article, make a list of 100 persons to call, text, visit or send a gift to. To help with the list you can categorise them into;

Those who help out with

1. Your health: Call or visit your doctor, nurse, fitness instructor.... everyone that helps you keep healthy
2. Your education: Teachers, mentors and everyone that taught you something of value in the past year
3. Family: Wife, kids and siblings
4. Business: Employees(remember the cleaners and guards), colleagues and business partners and customers
5. Neighbours, friends

Tell them thank you.

Article also posted on sadiqadeyanju.com