Supercharge Your Gratitude with the Power of Specificity

When I first heard about the power of gratitude in shaping a better life, I dismissed it. I’m an optimistic, happy guy most of the time, and I had lots to be grateful for, how was writing it down going to help? Writing is for losers, and besides, one of the things I’m definitely not grateful for is my penmanship, which sucks. I didn’t need to see more of that in my life.

Years later my optimistic happy self was having a down period and I again read about gratitude journaling. It occurred to me I could bypass the penmanship problem by leveraging technology.

First I decided to write an email to myself every day. I mentioned this to my daughter Nikki who was at university, and she suggested, “why don’t you send me the email instead, and I can send you a response with my own gratitude items?”

Accountability along with technology! Brilliant! She obviously gets it from me.

My email with the subject header ‘Grateful day 1’ contained three items that I was grateful for.

1. Our nanny made me a sandwich.

2. I saw a movie with Nikki and my two boys.

3. Our dog pooed promptly when I took him for a walk.

You can see here that in addition to having a low bar for gratitude, I was extremely specific. It was easy to be specific because I considered the email to my daughter to be a bit of a status update as well as a gratitude practice.

What happened next is that I was having so much fun with the exercise, I started exchanging gratitude emails with my friend Neeraj, and also with my wife. That was three emails with three gratitude items and status updates and it started to take up a lot of time. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much gratitude?

The email gratitude exchange was a 30 day experiment and at the end of the month I decided to give it up. But the power of gratitude was now in my life. When I meditated, when I went for a walk, or when I was staring out a window and appreciating the view, I would often find myself being grateful for some aspect of my life.

And kind of by accident, because of it starting with status updates, I’ve always been really specific with my gratitude. Nikki asked me at one point how I came up with all these different items to be grateful for, and I told her it was easy as soon as you stopped trying to write the three things you were most grateful for.

A couple of years ago I started formally tracking my gratitude again, this time in a journal that I update every month. I was writing “friends” an awful lot in the journal and I hate repeating myself, so I decided to name specific friends. Even then it was typically the same few who made my list each month so in a burst of creativity, I wrote down something specific that each friend had done that I was grateful for.

To my surprise, this unlocked a hidden power to the friend gratefulness experience. Because suddenly, if I was being specific, I could think of things that many more of my friends had done for me.

It’s like the trick where if you ask someone to name three things you find in a fridge, they’ll actually be slightly faster if you ask for three white things you find in a fridge.

Then it got even better. As I went through a mental list of the people who I’m closest to, it was so easy to come up with items that I became more grateful than I already was for having all these people in my life.

I love my wife and could just write ‘wife’ on my gratefulness list, but I thought of something specific — my wife has made me realize the value of spending more time with fewer people. There’s a lot more, but don’t get trapped into only coming up with the thing you’re most grateful for.

My daughter has sustained my love of movies by coming with me to almost any movie I want to see. Over four hundred to date. She also claps for all my articles here. She’s out of control.

With friends, it’s easy to be grateful for their companionship and their sunny personalities, but far more powerful to be super specific. Here are a few that came to me when first thought about it.

My friend Sanjeev Goel organized a biohacking conference years ago where I first learned about psychedelics for therapy, met the researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, and completely altered the trajectory of my life.

My friend Kevin Higgins taught me to ask, “Who’s hand do I have to shake?” when attempting to bribe, I mean tip, my way past a line at a nightclub.

And then it still got better. All this gratefulness was creating the basis of conversations I could be having with all of my friends, and I made sure I told the relevant people about each of these things I was grateful for. Possibly my entire purpose in life is to develop more, better relationships, and these sorts of conversations are gold coins in the realm of social interaction.

I recently had a friend say to me, “Dude, I’ve never told you this specifically, but I have a lot more fun when you’re at a party. Thanks for all the great conversations.” That’s a supercharged version of “Nice to see you.”

Next time you’re journaling or meditating or staring out a window, think of specific people in your life and some specific way that they’ve made your life better. Then tell them. That revving noise you hear is a supercharged relationship engine.

Tell your spouse you appreciate that she makes you more organized. Tell your teenager that you love all his questions. Tell your friend that you appreciate he always makes sure there is good music at any event.

Have a specific conversation about a specific appreciation. It adds emphasis and lets the person know this is important.

In a great epilogue to the email exercise my daughter and I started and abandoned, after talking to her about this article, she looked up the original emails we exchanged and we had so much fun reading them that we’ve decided to restart the practice.

Supercharge your gratefulness practice. Start right now by telling me exactly why you appreciate this article. Thanks for reading!

1. My article on why I journal.