J.R.: [00:00:00] Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of One Thousand Gurus where we share the stories and lessons from people of all walks of life, and I'm your host, J.R. Yonocruz.

So today's episode is a little bit different than usual, and it's one that I've been sitting on for a while.

This is a milestone episode because I turned 35 earlier this year, And to celebrate, instead of bringing on a guest, I wanted to do something more introspective and give you my 35 favorite life lessons, one for every year I've been alive. So if you followed my blog at marloyonocruz.com for a while, you already know the tradition.

At the end of every single year since 2016, I write a year in review post, and somewhere in there I compile the life lessons that that year has taught me. 10 years is a lot of material, so for this one I went back through basically a decade of those posts and on top of that, I sat down and deliberately interviewed myself, worked through a set of pretty pointed questions about relationships, career, health, faith, identity, all of it, specifically to pull material that wasn't written down anywhere.

What I ended up with was [00:01:00] way more than 35 candidates, so narrowing it down took some real editing. I grouped everything into eight categories and within each category I tried to order the lessons from the more obvious, easier to swallow ones to the more hard-won ones. 

One more thing before we get into it, I put together a free one page per category PDF with all 35 lessons and links to every book, blog post, and past episode that I reference today, so you don't have to scramble to write anything down. That'll be linked in the show notes. All right, let's get into it. 35 lessons for 35 years.

Section one: body and energy. Let's start with the category that's most obvious on paper and the one that's still the easiest to ignore in practice, your body.

Lesson one, sleep is the lever. I did a whole book highlight episode on this a couple weeks back, the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, and the thing that stuck with me since isn't just the science, it's the compounding.

A consistent early bedtime is the one habit that upgrades everything downstream of it, my energy, my mood, [00:02:00] whether I actually make it to the gym. It's not a hack, it's just the foundation that everything else sits on, more important than nutrition, more important than exercise, and way more important than supplements.

Lesson number two, gamify your movement. The two books that pushed me here were The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter and Built to Move by Kelly and Juliet Starrett. Both got me thinking about movement as something you should be chasing, not avoiding. So I turned walking into a game, especially after I got a Fitbit a few years back.

Ten to twelve thousand steps a day baseline, no negotiations. So now I park further away, I take the long way, and I split up my walking errands into multiple different trips, and so I try to be the least optimized as possible. For example, going down to the kitchen to cook food or to wash dishes or something like that.

I try to break it up a lot. Most people try to optimize their day to walk as little as possible, like finding the closest spot or the shortest path, and I do the opposite on purpose in order to get more steps. [00:03:00] And it's completely changed my relationship with something as basic as using my own legs and just wanting to move more instead of being sedentary.

Lesson three: Rest and recovery is the real lever. So this one is, in conjunction with the sleep one. As your body gets older, it also gets less resilient. That's just true, and I feel it more than I did at twenty-five. But the lesson isn't just rest more because you're aging.

In the book Peak Performance by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness made the case that recovery isn't a consolation prize for getting older. It's actually the key lever for improving your performance at any age. Stress plus rest is what produces growth. Stress without rest is just wear and tear. That reframe is how I think about pushing myself at any stage of life.

The more I want to grow, the harder I have to train. But the more I train, the better and more effective I have to rest.

Section 2: Productivity and Systems. The next category is productivity, habits, systems, and how I actually get things done across a life that's got a lot of [00:04:00] simultaneous moving parts.

Lesson four: Set everything up to receive you. This comes from my conversation with Ramy Sidhom, one of my favorite rapid-fire answers that I've ever gotten on this show. He put it as, quote, "Set everything up to receive you in the best way," end quote, which basically means do the annoying thing now so your future you has it easier.

For me, that's washing dishes tonight instead of leaving them for tomorrow morning, keeping my room clean, leaving on time so I'm not stressed out in traffic, et cetera. I knew this intellectually for years, but reframing it as self-care, as literally taking care of a future version of myself that I should cherish, gave it a lot more weight than just, quote-unquote, "Be responsible."

Lesson five, break one link in the cycle. This is a personal one. My biggest recent productivity wins trace back to sleeping earlier so I can work out first thing in the morning, and the reason I can sleep earlier is because I'm doom scrolling a lot less during the day, and this helps me wind down a lot sooner.

But the reason why I'm able to doom scroll less is because I've [00:05:00] also put in systems to reduce the amount of time I'm just scrolling on social media, and I log out of my accounts, and I put timers and blockers and everything and all that jazz.

So less scrolling leads to sleeping earlier, which leads to an earlier workout, which leads to more energy, and that reinforces the entire cycle. You don't have to fix everything at once, just fix one link, and sometimes the whole chain flips from working against you to working for you. And the same logic scales up to the whole day, not just the sleep to workout loop.

 Front-loading your best habits and hardest decisions earlier in the day has outsized ripple effects downstream. The better your morning, the better your afternoon and night end up being, almost automatically. Also, as an aside, the book The Willpower Instinct talks about how our willpower is like a tank of gas, which is the most full at the beginning of the day and then slowly depletes throughout the day.

So therefore, If you do your hardest tasks and most important tasks at the beginning of the day when your willpower is higher, it's easier to get it done

Lesson six: Carve big goals into [00:06:00] small slots. So right now I'm juggling the podcast, fitness goals, running, dancing consistently, the blog and book summaries, my relationship, building out my coaching practice, a lot at once. What's actually worked isn't some grand plan, it's carving small tasks out of each of those projects and slotting them

into recurring time blocks every week. Steady simultaneous progress instead of waiting for that mythical free week that never comes

Lesson seven: Protect one highlight a day

From the book Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, I actually did a book summary highlight episode on this too. Pick one thing each day that you want to feel good about by the end of it, not your only task for the day, but your highlight. Then protect it above whatever else is competing for your attention.

And this connects back to the last point, the sooner in the day you actually get your highlight done, the more the rest of your day gets to just be guilt-free. You've already done the one thing that mattered, so you can now start to have fun and do other things, relax, recuperate, et cetera.

[00:07:00] But if you do that every single day for the next year, that's three hundred sixty-five highlights that you've gotten done, and If you prioritize correctly, that's a lot of progress towards your meaningful goals

Lesson eight: Progress comes from reps, not shortcuts.

I've committed to bowling four times a day, about five or six days a week, purely to put in the reps and get better. Also, shout-out to the summer pass that allows me to bowl that many times per day, and also me wanting to get the most value out of that pass, and it's working. I'm breaking 200 multiple times in a month now instead of once a year like before.

That same principle is the entire basis for committing to 10 years on this podcast. I want to actually develop skill at this, and I know that's only possible by putting in the reps consistently over a long period of time. Lesson nine: Play the long game.

I heard this framing from one of my guests, Andrew Tran, who attributed it to another guest, Dr. Arnelle Calvario. He says, "The best investment you'll ever make is in yourself." For me, that's meant reading two to three personal development [00:08:00] books a month since 2014 and writing book summaries for over 12 years now in order for me to really digest and learn the lessons from those books.

Out of every habit that I've built in my life, this is the one that's paid the highest dividends hands down, as knowledge compounds, and it changes how you think before it ever changes what you do. And that's an investment that makes a lot of sense because as you change your mindset and your inner world, your outer world and how you manifest that into the real world will show those results, but those results don't come over time.

They come over a long period of time in the span of years. So changing your mind will have ripple effects that compound in the long term. And that's really the same mentality underneath everything in this whole section, that long-term investor mindset that I personally have. Trusting that compounding effort over years will pay off, it keeps you focused on what actually matters instead of chasing the instant gratification and short-term wins that trip most people up when they start something new, and they really wanna be successful overnight.

Lesson 10: Make your [00:09:00] bed. Simple and almost a cliché, but it's from Admiral William McRaven's book of the same name, Make Your Bed, and it holds up. The best way to start your day is a quick and easy win that builds momentum. It costs you maybe 30 seconds, but small wins like that, especially near the beginning of your day, repeated daily, slowly turn into an identity.

You become someone who follows through, and you do what you commit to doing, one made bed at a time. Lesson 11: Own less, live more. So two books changed my relationship with my own stuff or my things, which is The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki. The core idea from both is that the more things you own, the more those things own you.

I only try to keep what's highly functional or sparks joy, but ideally both. Having less isn't just aesthetically nicer, it's dramatically less stressful. It's a lot easier to [00:10:00] move, organize, clean, and keep track of everything when you're intentional about what you actually own instead of just buying and owning things just to buy and own them.

And Kondo's idea that everything has a place, quote-unquote, turned into an actual habit for me. So I put things back where they belong now almost automatically, which keeps my space a lot more organized without any extra effort. Also, combined with the fact that when you treat your things with respect, as Marie Kondo says in her book, those things tend to last longer.

It's kind of one of those intuitive things, but when you put things back in their place, when you treat them with respect, when you take care of them, lo and behold, they last longer.

Section three, career. This is one where a lot of what I learned came from mentors and guests, so I want to give credit where it's due.

Lesson 12: track your value. So years ago, my former coworker and guest on this show, Clark Fielding, taught me to diligently track what I do and the value that I add at work, not just for a performance review, but [00:11:00] it protects you, and it's leverage for whatever negotiation comes next, and I still do this to today.

It's something I really want to hammer home, that nobody in your workforce is going to track the value that you add to the company. No one's gonna take care of you. You have to do it yourself. But this one practice is one that, again, pays huge dividends in the long run, because as you do that, you're not only protecting yourself, but it can significantly enhance and be the springboard for your career as 

It means a lot when you track everything that you do, when you're intentional about your work, and you can always look out for yourself. Lesson 13: build trust to build feedback loops. So this comes from the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. If your goal is a high-performing team or to build one, and I've led plenty, both at work and in the dance community, the most important thing you can do is cultivate trust.

Trust is what makes honest feedback loops actually possible, and once people can give and receive real feedback without it feeling personal or unsafe, [00:12:00] that's what accelerates growth and performance. It's all about building psychological safety into your organization. Everything else, process, incentives, tools, et cetera, is all downstream of building a culture of feedback loops and safety and trust.

Lesson 14: find the intersection that's uniquely yours. So this showed up in my 2022 lessons post, and it's still one that I lean on. To be the best in your niche, sometimes you have to create the niche. Find the intersection of your skills and interests, what you're actually good at and what you actually enjoy, and that intersection or that Venn diagram becomes your unique value.

You don't need to be the best in the world at any one narrow thing. You need to own a combination that nobody else occupies. I would also like to say even if you don't become the best at that niche, and let's say even if you found your niche and there are dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of people who also do that, I think there's just no downside to doing something that you both love and enjoy and are good [00:13:00] at.

Because when you're doing that, you find the meaning and fulfillment and purpose, and you feel good, and you will inherently get better because you're putting in the reps because you enjoy doing that thing, and you'll get better. And so even if you don't become the best, being top five, top 10 in the world at that thing that you actually enjoy and are good at and are made for and are wired to do, that is a no-lose situation.

Lesson 15: listen like it's a superpower. So hosting this podcast has taught me this more than anything else in my career. Active listening, which is genuinely digesting and understanding what someone is saying because you're actually trying to learn something, not just waiting for your turn to talk, is an exponentially more valuable skill than talking well.

It's also a prerequisite for something we'll get into later in this episode, the idea that feelings crave acknowledgement. You can't acknowledge what you didn't actually hear.

Section four: Money and freedom. I've written about personal finance at length in my blog, book summaries, and even an episode [00:14:00] of this show, and it's honestly one of the topics that I get into the most.

So this section leans on the books that have shaped almost everything I believe about money.

Lesson 16: Never play financial Russian roulette. So this one is straight from Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money, and it's the one takeaway I've probably repeated to friends more than any other financial lesson.

No potential upside is worth a bet that you can't survive. Staying in the game long enough for compounding to actually work matters way more than any single win ever will. It's again, with the metaphor, why would you play Russian roulette with your finances?

Because if you lose, then you lose everything. Similar to playing Squid Game, if you win, you can win multiple millions of dollars, but if you lose, then what's the point?

Lesson 17: F-you money buys freedom. So this is from the book JL Collins' The Simple Path to Wealth. This became one of my top three personal finance books almost immediately.

The goal of saving isn't wealth for wealth's sake. What's the point of having a bunch of money [00:15:00] if you don't use it? But the point of wealth is to have the freedom to do what you wanna do, but more importantly, not do what you don't wanna do. The freedom to say no. The freedom to say no to a job, a relationship, a situation that isn't serving you without your finances being the thing that's holding you hostage, and that's the whole point.

Lesson 18: There's no cookie cutter finance plan.

This is something I've really internalized this past year coaching multiple clients on personal finance. I talked about a bit with Julie Huynh on an earlier episode, the buy versus rent conversation. But if you run the numbers purely on logic, buying a house where I live is often a bad decision.

But with that being said, money is deeply personal, and it has to be combined with your own values, not applied like some simple formula that applies to everyone. Buying a house might make total sense for someone if you factor in what they actually value, not just the math and logic of the numbers.

So for example, if you have [00:16:00] kids or you have pets and you need the space, you like renovating, you like living in a certain area, you want to do things with your house, you wanna live near family, or you want to be able to host people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all the benefits of having a house. If those things are very important to you, then it doesn't really matter what the m- money is.

Well, it does matter if you have to run the numbers to make sure you can afford it safely and reasonably. But that needs to go into the calculus of whether or not you should buy the house.

Lesson 19: Invest in what you use every day. This one's simple, but it's paid off. Spend well on the things that you use constantly,

Like your car, your phone, your computer, your shoes, your bed, et cetera. Things that you're constantly using and get the most value out of. And as a disclaimer, this isn't necessarily the most, quote-unquote, "expensive version" of what you're trying to buy, and just buying expensive for the sake of it, because as we all know, price does not always equate to quality.

But investing intentionally in quality that you [00:17:00] actually know will improve your daily life, that's where you get the highest return on your money, not from the stuff you use once, but the things that you touch every single day. Section five: Love and relationships. 

This is the biggest category, and honestly, probably the one that I have to relearn the most, and is probably most applicable to most of the audience.

Lesson 20: Weigh actions over words. I used to believe that relationships take effort in the way that if you just try hard enough, force of will can hold something together, even if it's not fully healthy.

But I learned in my mid-20s that you really have to let a relationship be and change without forcing it. And in my early 30s, I learned to not ignore the signs of a one-sided friendship. Being clear-eyed about when I'm putting in more than the other person, instead of deluding myself into thinking that they feel the same way I do.

Doing so just robs your own peace of mind, and it's not worth it. Intent is nice to hear about, but how someone actually shows up consistently over time tells you more than anything they'll ever [00:18:00] say.

Lesson 21: Real love is acceptance plus accountability. So my parents, especially my mom and my grandparents, taught me that family means unconditional love and having each other's backs no matter what.

But to me, keeping each other accountable to be our best selves also has to be part of that equation. Calling things out when necessary, and being there with an empathetic ear so someone knows that they're not alone and that they are accepted

Lesson 22, boundaries make closeness possible. This one shows up in my year-end lessons post almost every single year since 2021.

But the book Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend put language to something that I already believed but hadn't fully articulated. Boundaries aren't walls. They're actually the thing that makes real intimacy possible, because you're not quietly resentful or overextended the whole time. You can't have a true relationship if you don't know where you end and they begin, and having that boundary allows you to now love the person that they are because it's not mixed in with who you are.

Lesson 23, [00:19:00] reconnect on purpose. Building out this podcast and inviting old friends that I hadn't talked to in years taught me that putting a little extra energy to reconnect with people that you like and admire is one of the most powerful levers you have to improve your quality of life.

I actually got some of that language from the book 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think by Brianna Wiest which pushed me to be even more intentional about it. You don't just revive old relationships, you deepen the active ones too through conversations that actually mean something.

Lesson 24, feelings crave acknowledgement. This is from the book Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, and I think it might be the single most useful relationship concept I picked up this year.

Almost everything you want in a relationship is on the other side of a difficult conversation you've been avoiding, and the thing that makes those conversations actually go well is understanding that feelings crave acknowledgement. Before you get anywhere near solving the actual problem, you have to make the other person feel heard.

That's the whole listening point from earlier applied directly.

Lesson 25, cherish [00:20:00] family and the spaces where you're accepted as you are. So for me personally, I make it a point to visit my family up in Northern California three to four times a year, especially my aging grandparents.

And on paper, it's not really the most convenient use of time as I'm only there for barely 24 to 36 hours. But knowing that I'm intentionally spending that time, which is genuinely the most limited resource any of us has, makes me more present when I'm there. Because most of the time, all we actually do is just have dinner and sit around the living room and talk about random stuff, and that's all fine and good, but I also find that that's some of the best moments I have of my year is when I'm spending time with my family, people who care and love and accept me as I am.

But there's a deeper layer to that. Looking back on 15-plus years as a working adult, if you're like me, you're laser-focused on achievements, and then you start tying your self-worth to what you've accomplished, and then you start believing that people only like you for those achievements or what you can give to them.

But when I [00:21:00] juxtapose that to when I'm just spending time hanging out with family, where I know that I'm loved unconditionally and accepted, and I don't have to perform or have anything to prove, I've noticed that that experience is unparalleled and can't really be replicated anywhere else. So the advice is to remember and protect those spaces and be in them as much as possible

Section six: Travel and perspective.

Two lessons here, but they've shaped how I think about basically every trip that I take or vacation.

Lesson 26, your way is not the only way. I talked about this with my friend Rani on a previous episode, but travel shows you different ways of living, which gives you perspective that the way you do things isn't necessarily the, quote, unquote, "right way."

That should open you up to think more creatively, question your own assumptions, and consider different perspectives, especially when your current ones are keeping you stuck.

Lesson 27, wherever you go, there you are. This is the title of a book called the same thing, Wherever You [00:22:00] Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

This is a book that I read earlier this year, and it turned out to be more true than expected. If you're dealing with something internally, you can't travel somewhere to find yourself because it doesn't actually fix anything, because wherever you go, there you are. You bring the same issues wherever you go and wherever you land.

And I think that's the reason why in my last international trip, my trip to Japan last year in the fall/winter time, wasn't as much fun as previous trips because internally, I was still working through some things. So now I'm intentional about keeping an open energy to wherever I go so that I'm actually in the best state to receive whatever's in front of me and really immerse myself in the experience and have fun, and allow the travel to transform me, find myself, quote, unquote, or really just enjoy an experience that's, that makes life worth living.

Section seven: Faith and meaning. So this is a shorter section, but this is the thread that runs underneath almost everything else on [00:23:00] this list

Lesson 28: Walk by faith, not sight. 2 Corinthians 5:7. So this is one of my favorite Bible verses, and it's one that I come back to the most when I'm worried about the future, which honestly is not that often, but I also quote this to people who I can clearly see when I'm talking to them or hear that they're anxious about everything under the sun.

But it's kept things in perspective for me, and I don't really need certainty about what's coming. I just need to put one foot in front of the other each day towards something meaningful, and then I trust that God will take care of it and it'll work out.

Lesson 29: Refusing generosity refuses love. So I used to be closed off to other people's generosity.

Honestly, it's probably something I got from my mom because she always tells us not to buy her gifts. And so I think by definition, I grew up not really being a big gift-giving or gift-receiving person by nature.

But the more I've graciously accepted the loving intent behind a gift, which is [00:24:00] something from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, because a gift isn't about the actual thing, it's about the intent behind it, the more I've noticed that abundance actually flows more freely into my life. And so now I've reframed it as refusing a gift is refusing someone's expression of love for you.

So I always be sure, moving forward now, to always accept a gift with generosity and appreciation and grace because that person wanted to express something to me, and I want to receive it by accepting that gift.

Lesson 30: Helping others is the fastest way out of your own head. This is something that I have to keep relearning myself, and it's also a really good piece of advice or wisdom for pretty much everyone.

Whenever I'm most unhappy, I notice that it's almost always because I'm too focused on myself. But the moment I'm helping someone else, like listening to a friend when they need it, trying to make a stranger's day a little bit better, it becomes almost impossible to stay stuck in whatever is bothering me.

And I think [00:25:00] that's why, moving forward, I'm a lot more intentional and seeking opportunities to serve and give back, especially to underserved communities or people who really can't give back to me because they are in a different position than I'm in, because I'm so fortunate and blessed to have the things that I have, whether it be finances, health, et cetera, perspective, wisdom, that I'm trying to find more places where I can give back to people or groups or communities that have nothing to offer me because I know that it's a tide that lifts all boats where it makes their life better, it makes my life better, it takes me out of my own head, and it makes me realize that my problems really aren't that bad, and it's just something that's good to do

Section eight, self-awareness, detachment, and identity.

So this one's the deepest section, and it's honestly something that I'm still working through, and I think maybe a lot of us are as well.

Lesson 31: do it because you love it, not for the validation. So this is something I had to learn through years of being in leadership roles or being in positions where I'm constantly [00:26:00] giving, 

quietly hoping someone would notice and appreciate the effort that I was putting in. But the reality is, sometimes they don't, and sometimes nobody says anything at all. And so the lesson here that I keep coming back to is you have to do the things that you enjoy or that you know are worthwhile because life is short, not because you're hoping someone will validate you for it.

You should do it regardless of what anyone else thinks, because you know it's worth doing. If the validation comes, great. If it doesn't, the thing still has to be worth doing on its own.

Lesson 32: suffering traces back to attachment. So I reference the book Awareness by Anthony de Mello more than almost any other book when I talk about this, and it came up again in my conversation with my friend Kenta earlier on this podcast.

Almost all of our pain, you can trace it back to attachment. Whether that's attachment to an identity, a relationship, a label, a career, someone's specific behavior, an outcome. When you're too attached to any of that, it hurts when things don't go the way you expected.

[00:27:00] Detachment isn't giving up. It's the ongoing lifelong practice of letting go of what you cannot control. So I'm still learning this one. Way easier said than done, but it's helped out a lot when I realized, "Okay, I'm in pain," or I'm sad, or I'm hurt, or whatever. What am I too attached to that I can let go of because I don't need to hold onto it?

And that's helped out way more times than I can count. Lesson 33: the happiness formula. So this is from Mo Gawdat's Solve for Happy. It's one of my favorite books, and it's become my go-to introspection tool. So the formula is happiness equals your perception of the events of your life, minus your expectations of how life should behave.

Whenever I notice I'm unhappy, I run this formula on myself. Were my expectations the actual source of my problem and not the event itself? That question alone has helped me reframe my way out of a lot of emotional spirals.

Lesson 34: name the emotion precisely. This one is from the book Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown. What helps most in navigating your emotions [00:28:00] is correctly and precisely labeling them. And the great thing about this book is that it's like an encyclopedia of emotions and the words and labels that you can use. Kinda like when you only know how to say red, but when in reality there's ruby, there's maroon, there's all these other things.

And so it's kinda like that, where you think it's sad, but it's actually all these other... It could be on a spectrum of different emotions that are rooted from the base emotion of sad. So for example, you might think that you're mad, but in reality you might actually just be disappointed, and that distinction really matters because it helps point you towards the actual root cause instead of letting you react to the wrong thing.

And on the other side of the coin, it helps you solve that more effectively because how you solve mad is different from how you solve disappointed.

All right, and the last one, lesson 35: don't compare your journey to anyone else's. This is probably a huge cliché, and we all have heard it before, but comparison is the thief of joy, of [00:29:00] course.

This one's been showing up in my lessons posts as far back as 2018 and 2019, and it's still very much true to me, and I'm sure to all of us. The only fair comparison is to your own past self. Someone else's timeline, their relationship, their career, their body, their bank account, et cetera, was never yours to keep pace with in the first place.

I know it's hard, but for me, social media is one of those things that accelerates this comparison trap because that's what social media's for, especially platforms like Instagram, where it's there to show off your life and your highlight reel, and then everyone else is like, "Wow, everyone else is so amazing.

My life is trash in comparison." But I found that the more I'm off of social media, the happier I am because I'm not comparing myself and I'm just doing what I enjoy. Easier said than done, but the takeaway here is just try to do whatever you can to put yourself in environments and states where you're not actively comparing yourself or it's just harder to do because you're focused on yourself or helping other people All right, so that is it.

35 lessons for 35 years of life [00:30:00] on this earth. Putting this together was honestly more introspective than I expected, which is great. Going back through a decade of my own writing and then sitting down with some pretty direct questions about myself made a few things clear that I hadn't fully connected before, like how much of this list, if I'm honest, circles back to the same core idea, just holding on less tightly and letting people in more.

That shows up in the relationship lessons, the faith lessons, and definitely the attachment lesson towards the end.

So reminder, if you want to keep all 35 of these lessons somewhere where you can actually reference later, I put together a free companion PDF grouped the same way I just walked through it, with links to every book, blog post, and past episode that I mentioned today.

That's linked in the show notes.

So thank you guys all so much for being here for this one, for year 35 and however many years you've been listening along with me. If you have a second, please like, follow, subscribe, and leave us five stars on whatever platform you're listening on, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, et cetera.

I'd really appreciate it. [00:31:00] And as always, be sure to be kind to other people, especially yourself, and remember that you can always learn something from someone if you take the time to listen. So thank you guys for being here, and here's to the next 35.