This year, we just want to say thank you to you for taking the time to listen and read our newsletter this year (here's our archive).

I know that I’m not the best writer on the web. Some of our writings can be long, boring, and not as incisive as we would like them to be.

In fact, two authors with better newsletters that I recommend you to read are Farnam Street, and James Clear.

Here’s the thing though.

When I first started on my self-development journey, I was addicted to self-help books. I would read 1 self-help book a week, highlight the important points, copy down the quotes, and then faithfully type them out.

Every month, I would spend a Sunday holed up in a small room on university in Nottingham, and then reflect on the state of my life.

You can imagine how boring that sounded.

But it got me very, very far in life. It got me to win a first-class honours, get shortlisted for the Global Graduate prize in Nottingham, and even write a book, all whilst being a part-time student.

But the turning point came when I returned to Singapore, and all of that came crashing down. I was jobless, and binging on food to fill the emptiness within me. I felt lost.

Without a job, who was I?

The answer was, I was still John. Still the same guy that had just won awards a month ago.

How could it have changed so fast?

There are many lessons, but the lesson I wanted to draw out was the idea that

life is a learnable series of steps.

1. Life is not learnable.

You can’t learn how to lead a life just by reading another self-help book. 

Because that author’s life is written in his context, with him following his own methodology to life.

You can copy, but you can’t get the same results.

The more important thing to learn is how people adjust.

That’s why we’ve been so insistent on writing the stories of people we meet daily in the course of business, or even during the time when we are badly cut by others.

Because these experiences whilst not replicable, contain seeds of lessons.

We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have found the challenge of finding better stories, better lessons, a thrilling process.

This Christmas, wherever you’re at, we want to thank you. We've written 4 books over the years, and we would like to give you one this Christmas.

Let us know which book you’d like, and we would post them to you. Fill up the link here.

We don’t know if we’re going to be made bankrupt by this, but it’s our way of saying thanks.

Please feel free to pass on the link to someone whom you think might need it more too.

John