Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books)

by A.J. Jacobs

I’ve read enough about gratitude to know that it’s one of the keys to a life well lived. Perhaps even, as Cicero says, it is the chief of virtues.

According to the research, gratitude’s psychological benefits are legion: It can lift depression, help you sleep, improve your diet, and make you more likely to exercise.

gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being and good relationships, beating out twenty-four other impressive traits such as hope, love, and creativity.

“Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.”

Second, coffee has a huge impact on our world. More than two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day around the globe. The coffee industry employs 125 million people internationally.

While waiting, I force myself to stash my smartphone in my pocket and actually notice my surroundings. The act of noticing, after all, is a crucial part of gratitude; you can’t be grateful if your attention is scattered.

I know I’ve treated many others—waiters, delivery people, bodega cashiers—as if they were vending machines. I sometimes wear these noise-cancelling headphones when running errands, so that just makes me look more aloof and unfriendly. And this is an enemy of gratitude. UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons—who is considered the father of gratitude research—puts it this way: “Grateful living is possible only when we realize that other people and agents do things for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Gratitude emerges from two stages of information processing—affirmation and recognition. We affirm the good and credit others with bringing it about. In gratitude, we recognize that the source of goodness is outside of ourselves.”

“Gratitude has a lot to do with holding on to a moment as strongly as possible,” Scott told me. “It’s closely related to mindfulness and savoring. Gratitude can shift our perception of time and slow it down. It can make our life’s petty annoyances dissolve away,

it’s hard to be grateful if we’re speeding through life, focusing on what’s next, as I tend to do. We need to be aware of what’s in front of us. We need to stop and smell the roses, along with the graham crackers and soil and leather.

The psychologist Emmons suggests: “Next time you are feeling grateful to someone, give him or her a hug, or a touch on the hand or shoulder.”

In this post–Harvey Weinstein world, unsolicited hugs seem like an excellent strategy to avoid. But another strategy seems safer: Writing thank-you notes. I carve out an hour around lunchtime every day and write about ten notes that I send off via email, LinkedIn, and good old-fashioned paper envelopes. The etiquette books say the more personal the better, so I try to add details,

Slate published an article about pallets with the following headline: “The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy,”

it’s a good article, and the gist is correct: Pallets move everything.

Pallets save billions of hours of work every year. They’re designed to allow forklifts to pick them up and move the merchandise all at once

Here’s why I’m a fan of thanking our lucky stars every day: it helps with forgiving yourself your failures; it cuts down on celebrity worship and boosts humility; and, perhaps most important, it makes us more compassionate.

This is how psychologist David DeSteno puts it in his book Emotional Success. Recent research suggests that being prompted to recognize luck can encourage generosity.

Several of the gratitude books I’ve read suggested writing a gratitude letter and reading it out loud.