Gratitude is a Gift

It's my birthday.

I've got lots to be grateful for…and…I’ve got lots to fret over and complain about.

Indulge me a personal post. And a long one.

For most of us, life is hard. Even when it's going well, it's hard.

In founding this company, in chasing down an idea I couldn't shake, I've spent a lot of time reading about gratitude, thanksgiving, reciprocity and recognition.

We should teach this stuff. Really. It should be part of the core curriculum. We are doing it backwards.

Do yourself a favour and watch Shawn Achor's talk, "The Happiness Advantage." It's funny and poignant (and only 12 mins long).

Achor highlights that when we succeed, our systems and our society have trained us to enjoy the success only very briefly and then immediately turn to what's next. Each time your brain registers a win, the goalposts move. Get a better job. Make more money. Hit a bigger target.

That's a lot. It feels like a lot. It takes a toll.

Achor's core thesis runs opposite to what we're taught. Success does not beget happiness. The research is showing that happiness and positivity come first, THEN success. Achor implores us to seek out the positive. Not in a cloying way. In a practical, testable, two-minutes-a-day way.

In one of his experiments, Achor found that after 21 days of keeping a gratitude journal, people report that they actively seek out and see evidence of positivity in the world. The world didn't change. The ratio of good to bad out there is exactly what it always was. What changed is what they went looking for, and correspondingly what they found.

And that's where the success part comes in. A brain running positive outperforms a brain running neutral, stressed, or negative. Intelligence rises. Creativity rises. Energy rises. Productivity goes up, performance goes up, professionals make faster and higher quality decisions. Positivity isn't the reward for performing well. It's the condition that makes performing well more likely.

I'd noticed this in my own life without understanding the mechanism. A few years ago we started a gratitude practice at the dinner table. One at a time, each person says something they were grateful for that day. Usually a few things. Some mundane, some pretty remarkable. If someone made our day better, we try to name them. Not "I'm grateful for my friends," but the actual person and the actual thing they did.

After a while we noticed something. During the day, we'd be actively looking for people to thank. Positive moments to mention. We were scanning for things worth naming at dinner. The practice had quietly rewired what we paid attention to.

Robert Anton Wilson had a line for this. The Thinker thinks, and the Prover proves. Point your mind at something and it will go out and find you the evidence.

So if happiness can be practised, why don't we practise it more?

My reading also introduced me to a monk named David Steindl-Rast. He posits that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but rather that it is gratefulness that makes us happy.

See the pattern?

Happiness —> Success

Gratitude —> Happiness

Gratitude —> Happiness —> Success

We keep assuming we'll feel thankful once things are good enough. Once we've succeeded, then we can be happy. But gratitude isn't the reward waiting at the end. It's the thing that gets you there.

And here's the thing that keeps nagging at me.

These practices that Achor advocates for are solitary affairs. You, a notebook, two minutes. They work, and the evidence is solid. But much of what I'm grateful for isn't a thing. It's a person. Someone who covered for me. Someone who answered on a Sunday. Someone who did something they had no obligation to do.

Further, most of those people are not at my dinner table. They're in another building, another city, on the other end of an email. We feel the gratitude but it just sits there with nowhere to go.

Writing their name in a notebook does something for me. It does nothing at all for them.

One of  our five family rules is: “Never pass up an opportunity to make someone happy.” Small kindnesses cost little and reverberate greatly. It sounds simple until you try to actually live it, and then you notice how many of those opportunities pass by in an ordinary day without you taking them. Not because you didn't care. Because the moment moved and you didn't.

That gap is not a small thing. I think it's one of the more solvable problems nobody is paying enough attention to.

If noticing gratitude rewires the person doing the noticing, what happens when the gratitude actually reaches the person it was about?

Has that study been run? I don't know. We're trying to run it ourselves, in public, one lift at a time.

Birthdays have a way of making you count things. Not achievements. Not possessions. People. Another year isn't guaranteed, which makes gratitude feel less like self-help and more like good judgement.

So instead of a list of things I want, here are three things I'm grateful for.

• My family.

• My community - ever expanding.

• That I got another day, which was never promised.

Say the thing. Name the person. Don't let the moment pass.

Be grateful, be happy.

Be a legend and lift a legend.