Preface

Think back to when you were a child.

Did you have dreams that you would do great things? That you were meant for something magnificent? That you would leave a legacy that would be remembered by future generations?

These dreams never go away. They’re always present, hidden under the noise of the everyday. Sometimes we are gripped with sudden anxiety, a memory of our childhood ambitions that
quickly turns to guilt. This shift results from a fear that we will wake up—or already have woken up—to realize that we are living a life we weren’t made to. Maybe fear and guilt aren’t strong enough words—possibly lifelong regret and dissatisfaction are more like it. Facing this reality is like staring at your evil twin and evaluating all their missteps and shortcomings in life in relation to what they could have become, only to realize that you are in fact the twin who didn’t stack up.

At some moment in your life, you made a subconscious Promise to yourself as to whether you would lean into your gifts and develop them and do whatever it took to keep this Promise—or whether you would allow life to gobble your ambitions, aspirations, and greatest dreams and stick you in the mediocrity line.

And yet here you are...only scratching the surface of your potential, your greatest purposes still unfulfilled.

So often we are upset about how the world seems to have broken its Promise to us, as if life is just so tough and unfair and filled with unreliable people who are constantly letting us down. The
truth of the matter is, our failed commitments are the problem: when we break The Promise to ourselves, we have broken our Promise to The World.

The Promise to The One is a reminder of your original Promise to yourself about what you would make of your life.