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Another study summarized in Scientific American finds that 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.
As the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast says, “Happiness does not lead to gratitude. Gratitude leads to happiness.”
but I relish coffee’s bitter taste
It’s the bitter taste that I love
The act of noticing, after all, is a crucial part of gratitude; you can’t be grateful if your attention is scattered.
(Three dollars is, of course, ridiculously expensive. But in a weird sense, as I’ll learn, it’s also wildly underpriced.)
For later
The very fact that Ed thinks so deeply about my coffee is part of the reason I don’t have to think about it at all.
It’s a key reason gratitude is so difficult to maintain, and why it takes so much effort and intention: If something is done well for us, the process behind it is largely invisible.
When you find a place that knows you bette than you know you, stick with it.
“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, at least for a moment.”
Gratitude can slow time down.
We need to be aware of what’s in front of us.
We overemphasize individual achievement when, in fact, almost everything good in the world is the result of teamwork.
This! Teamwork
To battle my brain’s built-in negative bias, the one that might have helped our Paleo ancestors avoid predators but that often puts me in a miserable mood.
If I get one hundred compliments and one insult, what do I remember? The insult.
Fighting this bias requires an active strategy. A commitment to noticing.
Make a commitment to noticing
I’ve become a fan of a mental game I call “It could be worse.”
Small works of genius everywhere.
I thank Marke again and promise to be more appreciative of all the folks trying to make the world less ugly.
But I have a reason. I recently read a Wharton study that concluded that people who say the phrase “I am grateful” are seen as more genuinely thankful than when people simply say “thank you.”
That the exterior shapes the interior.
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”
well. I
can’t let gratitude devolve into its unhelpful cousin, complacency.
I’ve experienced this myself. I know I’m just one data point, but when I’m feeling grateful, I’m happier, and more likely to think of others. I’m more likely to empathize, to volunteer, to donate money to good causes. When I’m cranky or depressed, I revert to the selfish mind-set. “My life is miserable, so why should I bother helping anyone else?”
Grateful<happier<empathetic
“It’s one of the reasons why New York bagels and New York pizza taste so good,” says Adam.
Mark doesn’t hold a grudge. His family made out okay. His great-grandfather got a job in construction helping to lay bricks for the reservoir.
This is a huge theme I need to remember as part of Project Gratitude: My comfort often comes at the expense of others. I benefit daily from the disruption to this community. I need to be more grateful for these sacrifices.
Rule 1. Always be grateful but acknowledge that your comfort sometime comes at others expense. Try to correct this when you can.
but I’m with the CDC, which said the addition of chlorine to drinking water is one of the ten great health achievements of the twentieth century.
As her head rests on her pillow, she’ll go through the alphabet from A to Z and try to think of something to be grateful for that starts with each letter—A for her husband Andrew’s blueberry pancakes; B for bocce, her favorite game in the summer; etc.
It’s a challenge. It’s much easier to be grateful for a good thing (a raise at work, a delicious meal) than for the lack of a bad thing. But both are important.
Live life to its fullest as long as you allow other people to do the same and don’t interfere with the U.S. mail.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly annoyed about something—the rattle of the air conditioner, say—I’ll repeat a three-word phrase: “Surgery without anesthesia.” It’s a helpful little mantra: Surgery without anesthesia. When I initially read first-person accounts of eighteenth-century surgery, I was haunted for days, but it sure shut up my whining.
I’m a believer in capitalism—I think it’s the best way we’ve found so far to structure a society. But I don’t buy the laissez-faire idea. I think we need regulations. I’m in favor of a superego to control the market’s id.
The real world is no doubt a combination of luck and skill, but I lean strongly toward Ecclesiastes. If I had to put numbers to it, 20 percent of my fate has been determined by hard work and persistence, and 80 percent has been cosmic Powerball.
There are thousands of alternative-universe Steve Jobs working on assembly lines in factories.
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.
I need to remember, with a few flaps of the butterfly wings, I could have easily been anyone on this coffee chain instead of the consumer.
