Gratitude 3x/day
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Earlier this year, I read The Miracle Morning, which promises (paraphrasing here):
If you do these seven things every morning you’ll be the most amazing person you’ve ever met.
OK, it’s not exactly that bold, but it’s not far off. It wasn’t a terrible book, it had lots of good things, but the author made sure you knew he was awesome. (The author was at one point the top Cutco salesmen in the world…)
To be honest, I reluctantly enjoyed the book. I didn’t want to, and wanted to be able to mentally tune out, but it was compelling. Here’s Lifehacker on it, and James Altucher interviewing Hal Elrod.
Read those summaries before deciding to read the book.
Anyway - the ONE practice from this book that still impacts me today almost every day is that of “daily gratitude”. The Miracle Morning certainly wasn’t the first to discuss this, but it finally made it stick.
Every day, or almost every day, for much of the last five months, I’ve written down three things that I’m thankful for every day.
I started keeping them on a really long text document on my phone, but the size of the list was making it buggy. (Sidebar- Google Keep is a delightful app. Android, Mac, iPhone - it works everywhere.)
Every few months, I like to look back through what I’ve written and remember what caused me to write it. Since the only rule is “no repeating”, I’ve had to become attentive to the things I can be thankful for every day, since I need to find something new every day. (Three things every day, actually.)
If someone said “Hey, sit down and write 360 things you are thankful for”, it would take you a long time. You might not be able to. But write down three things a day for four months… there’s your list of 360 things.
Oh, I stopped using Google Keep, as I mentioned. Now I’m using Journey on Android and Chrome. So far so good. (It’s free)
Resources
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Day One App iPhone/Mac (I’ve not used this, but seems popular)