Just one day (after today) left until 2016. Part of being creative is reflecting. The most creative people are people of reflective thinking. They review everything in order to learn something from it. In fact, one of the main reason creative people are creative is because they spend a great deal of time learning from the past. They love trial and error because it helps them learn faster. This is why creative people are quick to jump out and start something, because they want to learn how to do it better by simply doing it. The only way to improve a result is to first get a result. If you spend your whole time waiting until everything is perfect you will wait forever not doing anything.

I want to encourage you to reflect upon 2015 and write down the greatest lessons you learned. Figure out what worked this year and what didn’t work. Did you meet your goals? Did you finish the year better off or worse off? What things happened this year that taught you how to do things better in the future?

Go into 2016 better off than you did going into 2015. The only way to do this is to LEARN from 2015. But you can’t learn from it if you don’t reflect upon it. So again, my challenge for all of us is to take some valuable lessons from 2015 into 2016 so that you can either repeat your success and build on them or change some areas that you messed up in. Don’t start 2016 until you have first extracted the good from 2015.

Make a list of the top 10 things you learned this year and live them out this upcoming new year!