You're Skipping the Wrong Holiday

Let me guess: you're treating Thanksgiving like a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas. A Thursday where you eat too much, watch football, and maybe mumble something generic about being grateful before diving into Black Friday deals.

And that's exactly why you're stuck.

Here's what nobody wants to admit: if you're treating Thanksgiving like another day off, you're actively sabotaging your own development. And I can prove it.

A Barn Full of Chaos

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving meant going to my mom's family. And let me tell you, it was completely foreign territory for me.

I was an only child. Quiet house. My own space. I was used to being left alone with my thoughts, my toys, in my own little world.

My mom came from a family of ten from the hills and hollers’ of Kentucky. All of her siblings went on to have multiple kids of their own. Thanksgiving gatherings included so many people that we had Thanksgiving in a barn because no single house could hold everyone. A literal barn.

For a quiet only child, this was pretty overwhelming. Loud. Chaotic. People everywhere. Cousins I barely knew running around. Adults talking over each other. No escape, no quiet corner for me to disappear into.

And you know what? Those barn Thanksgivings taught me more about people, myself, about navigating differences, about actually seeing humans instead of just tolerating them, than any book or course ever could. They're some of my fondest memories now.

Not because they were comfortable. Because they forced me to develop.

The Lie We Tell Ourselves

We've bought into this myth that development is about constant forward motion. Hustle culture tells us to optimize, execute, and never look back. Reflection is for people who aren't busy enough. Gratitude is for Instagram captions.

Bull!

You know what actually kills development? Sprinting so hard you never notice you're running in circles. Chasing the next achievement without learning anything from the last one. Building on a foundation you've never examined because you're too busy to look down.

Those barn Thanksgivings worked because they forced me to sell life differently. They created a moment where I had no choice but to be present with people who were nothing like me. Where I had to figure out how to connect across differences. Where I couldn't just retreat into my comfort zone. They gave me life to process when I was alone.

Thanksgiving isn't a break from your development. It's a stress test that reveals whether you're actually developing or just accumulating experiences and calling it growth.

Why Most People Fail This Test

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most people can't tell you what they learned this year. They can tell you what they did, the projects, the goals, the busy-work. But what they actually learned? What fundamentally changed about how they see themselves or the world? Crickets.

That's not development. That's just passing time.

Real development requires you to do the thing that makes everyone uncomfortable: stop and assess honestly. Not the filtered, LinkedIn version where everything was a "learning opportunity." The real version. Where you failed. Where you were wrong. Where someone else carried you. Where you got lucky.

I didn't learn to navigate people in that barn because I wanted to or because it was comfortable. I learned because I was forced to sit with the discomfort long enough to see what was actually happening. To notice patterns. To understand that my way of being in the world wasn't the only way.

Thanksgiving forces this moment. And most people are so terrified of honest self-assessment that they'd rather argue about politics with Uncle Bob than sit with the question: "Who did I actually become this year?"

The Gratitude Gap

Let's talk about something possibly more uncomfortable: your inability to acknowledge help.

I work with ambitious people all the time who are convinced they're self-made. They'll tell me about every obstacle they overcame, every skill they built, every win they earned. I ask them who helped, and they get vague. "Oh, you know, my team was great." "I've had good mentors."

That's not gratitude. That's a participation trophy you're handing out to avoid the vulnerability of admitting you needed people.

Here's what's actually happening. You're so invested in the story of your own competence that you can't acknowledge the specific ways specific people shaped you. And that's a development dead-end, because growth doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in relationship. And if you can't see the relationships clearly, you can't learn from them.

I didn't develop into someone who could work with different kinds of people because I figured it out on my own. I developed because I was surrounded by a barn full of people who showed me different ways of being. Loud where I was quiet. Connected where I was isolated. Present where I wanted to hide. It took me years to figure that out. I saw myself as the only one who helped me become me, but when I stopped and truly looked around, I saw a crowd of people who had been there all along, in big and small ways, pushing me to grow and become something more because they believed that I could.

Thanksgiving asks you to get specific. To name names. To remember moments. To acknowledge debt. And for a lot of people, that feels like giving up their origin story as the hero who did it alone.

Get over it. The hero who did it alone is a fiction, and buying into fictions doesn't make you develop - it makes you delusional.

What You're Actually Afraid Of

You know what really scares people about Thanksgiving? It's not the calories or the family drama.

It's the possibility that when you look back honestly, you'll realize you didn't grow as much as you thought. That you repeated the same patterns. Made the same mistakes. That you're not actually further along than you were last year - you're just busier.

So you skip the reflection. You keep moving. You tell yourself there's no time. You make Thanksgiving about everything except the one thing it's supposed to be about: taking stock.

And that's how you end up five years down the road wondering why you feel stuck despite all the motion.

Here’s the Point

Thanksgiving is the most important professional development activity of your year. More important than that conference you attended. More important than those books you skimmed. More important than your annual review.

Because all of those things are inputs. Thanksgiving is where you do the integration work that turns inputs into actual growth. It's where you ask:

• What patterns am I finally seeing that I was blind to before?

• What beliefs did I hold that turned out to be wrong?

• What did I learn about myself under pressure?

• Who showed me a better way, and what specifically did they show me?

• What am I doing now that I couldn't do a year ago?

Those questions? That's where development lives. Not in the doing, but in the sense-making afterward.

That barn full of chaos didn't teach me anything in the moment. It taught me something when I looked back and realized I had changed. That I could handle what used to overwhelm me. That differences didn't scare me anymore. That I'd learned to see people instead of just categorizing them.

The Assignment You're Going to Ignore

Here's what I want you to do this Thanksgiving, and here's why I think most of you won't do it:

Write down three specific ways you're different than you were last Thanksgiving. Not what you accomplished. Not what happened to you. How you're different. How you think differently. What you notice now that you missed before. What you can do now that you couldn't then.

Then write down the names of three people who contributed to those changes, and tell them specifically how they helped you develop.

You won't do it because it's uncomfortable. Because it requires admitting you needed help. Because it means facing whether you actually developed or just got older and busier.

But if you do it? You'll learn more about yourself in an hour than most people learn in a year.

The Bottom Line

Thanksgiving isn't a holiday. It's a checkpoint. It's where you find out if you're developing or just moving. If you're learning or just experiencing. If you're building on something solid or running on a treadmill.

Those barn Thanksgivings shaped me because they gave me no choice but to be present with discomfort, to see people clearly, to develop beyond my natural tendencies. They weren't convenient. They weren't always fun in the moment. But they mattered.

And if you skip it, if you treat it like just another Thursday with turkey and football, don't be surprised when you're standing in the same place next year, wondering why nothing's changed.

You want to develop? Start by having the courage to see where you actually are. That's what Thanksgiving offers. And that's what most people are too afraid to accept.

Happy Thanksgiving. Now do the work.