The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  Ambitious people don’t usually pause to enjoy what they’ve achieved because they’re fully focused on where they want to go next. In almost any profession, an enterprising soul can think of a way to move up—more money or a nicer office, a fancier title or an increase in power, a bigger box-office take or more followers on Twitter. When I mentioned to several people that my goal this month was to be more grateful for my current career as a writer, they looked at me dubiously, obviously concerned that if I took more pleasure in what I’d already conquered, I might veer off track and turn so happy-sappy in my work that I’d achieve . . . nothing more.

  But I didn’t think it would happen that way. In fact, quite the opposite seemed to be occurring. With gratitude so much a part of my life lately, I found myself more eager to face every day. I had started waking up earlier on these spring mornings and felt unexpectedly more energized. Seeing the good in the world made me want to be a participant. I decided to check with gratitude guru Robert Emmons, figuring that after a decade of researching the subject, he’d already encountered the question of whether gratitude would undermine ambition. I was right.

  “I’ve often heard the concern that being grateful will make you complacent and lazy and not motivated to improve your lot in life,” he said. “But our research shows just the opposite. Grateful people are more successful at reaching their goals than others.”

  I hadn’t expected that gratitude would make me lazy, but I was somewhat surprised to hear that instead of detracting from a need to achieve, it would actually contribute. But how exactly did that work?

  Dr. Emmons said that people who are “consciously practicing gratitude” gain a sense of purpose and a desire to achieve. To prove it, he had asked participants in one simple study to write down six things they wanted to accomplish in the next ten weeks. Some of them were then randomly assigned to keep a gratitude journal once a week. (Once a week? Piece of cake!) At the end of the experiment, Dr. Emmons determined that the grateful group made 20 percent more progress toward their goals than the non-grateful group—and seemed to be striving harder.

  His calculations seemed questionable—how can you get 20 percent closer to earning a raise? But I didn’t challenge the concept because the overall findings fit with my own experience. Dr. Emmons found that grateful people felt inspired to take action, not sit back passively.

  From the outside, it seemed obvious that some people should be grateful for their careers. Who wouldn’t want to be a movie star, a company president, a tech entrepreneur? But feelings of gratitude can’t get written into the job description—no matter how fabulous. I first understood that in one of those dreamy moments in my own career, sitting in a posh suite in the Dorchester Hotel in London, talking to the actor Daniel Craig for a magazine cover story. He had just finished shooting the James Bond movie Casino Royale, and as hard as it is to believe now, the early buzz on him had been bad. I was the first American reporter he was talking to about being Bond, and when I walked in, he looked wan and worried.

  We chatted casually for a few minutes while he ordered breakfast—the Japanese special from room service. When it arrived, he fiddled with his chopsticks and then looked at me with his icy-blue eyes.

  “I don’t want to be the one who fucked up the Bond franchise,” he said.

  He was physically exhausted from the grueling schedule of long days on the set and long nights at the gym, building the lean, muscular physique he wanted for his 007. Hunched over his breakfast, he didn’t exactly look like an action hero. But he promised me that he cleaned up nicely in the film and looked darn good in a tuxedo. (After seeing the movie, I agreed.)

  “All I really want to do now that this is over is hide on a lounge chair by a beach somewhere,” he said with a sigh.

  Craig knew his life was about to change, but he didn’t know exactly how. Worried both about making a great movie for the fans and maintaining the integrity of his own career, he couldn’t enjoy the moment. I was surprised to realize then (and now) that even for an actor on the verge of being a worldwide icon, happiness wasn’t a given.

  I noticed a bracelet on Craig’s wrist and leaned over to see it.

  “‘The more joy we have, the more nearly perfect we are,’” I said, reading the inscription on the band.

  Craig gave a tight-lipped smile. “It’s from Spinoza,” he said, referring to the seventeenth-century philosopher. “I love the idea that joy is what makes you perfect. It’s a good philosophy to get through life, isn’t it?”

  At the time when the weight of the movie world seemed to be landing on his ample shoulders, his Spinoza bracelet reminded him to appreciate life and find its joy.

  “Joy and gratitude. I’m not feeling either of them right now. But I plan to,” he said.

  Craig understood that he couldn’t count on finding joy on a movie set—he had to bring it with him. Feeling gratitude in the midst of a pressured situation can help you calm down and gain some perspective, and Craig knew that mattered. In person, he got high marks for being edgy, sexy, tough, and insightful. But gratitude didn’t come naturally, so he was smart enough to try philosophizing himself to happiness. Later, when Casino Royale made more money than any Bond movie in history, I hoped Craig felt better. It occurred to me that we could all use Spinoza bracelets to snap against our wrists, because whether you’re a movie star or a cabdriver, finding happiness at work comes from inside, not out.

  —

  My year of living gratefully had gotten me so excited that I started to think about how I could share my findings. I wanted to let others know that they could make their own lives better right now. I had recently met a literary agent I liked, and on a blusteringly windy day, I walked across town to her office and told her what I had been doing.

  “I love it,” Alice said, getting the concept immediately. Then lowering her voice as if sharing a secret, she said, “It’s so great how you changed your attitude toward your husband. My husband is amazing enough that I should be drowning in gratitude, but I get distracted and never tell him!”

  “It’s easy and it works,” I promised her.

  “Then you need to write about it,” she said firmly. And just like that, we agreed that my own personal gratitude diary could become the basis for The Gratitude Diaries. My yearlong hobby was now also my job.

  I’d spent most of the last twenty years with jobs that brought me to an office or a production studio, and now that I was writing full-time again, I missed having colleagues around. I couldn’t share with anyone that my goal this month was to be grateful for my work. But I figured I could tell myself—and also discuss it with my close friend Robert Masello, a terrific novelist who lived in Santa Monica, California. Wry, smart, and endlessly funny, he had been making me laugh since we first met as young writers in New York. Whenever I called so we could commiserate about making deadlines or being stuck at the computer, he always cheered me up. In the many years that I traveled to Los Angeles regularly to produce TV shows, we had frequent dinners together. And since I had expense accounts then, we could even order dessert. (“We don’t even have to split one?” Robert exulted once. “You mean I can have my very own tiramisu cake?”)

  Now I called Robert and told him I had a plan. I would start every day thinking of three reasons to be grateful for my job—and wanted him to do it with me. Seven A.M. on the East Coast, when I got up, equaled four A.M. in California, when he usually went to sleep. (Robert had been an insomniac for as long as I’d known him.) So we could write our lists at the same time, then tweet them or text them to each other. A gratitude chain across the whole country!

  “Give me an example,” Robert said warily.

  “Okay, I’m grateful to be a writer today because I get to interview interesting people. I’m being paid to look on the bright side. And my new book will help people.”

  “My new book will help people only if they don’t read it,” Robert joked.<
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  I laughed but told him that self-deprecating (which he did endearingly well) was out. Positivity was in. Sharing our encouraging thoughts about writing would elicit good vibes and make a day’s work seem a little brighter. Our version of Daniel Craig’s Spinoza bracelet.

  “Come on, try it,” I prompted. “You can come up with three reasons why you’re grateful to be a writer.”

  “Sure I can,” Robert said, getting into the spirit. “First, I can work at my own crazy schedule and never wake up to an alarm clock. Second, the popular girls who wouldn’t go out with me in high school finally rue the day. And third is a discovery I made one afternoon while I sat in the park and watched other people rushing to get to their offices—being a writer is like being rich, only without the money!”

  “You can needlepoint that one,” I said, laughing.

  Turning serious for a moment, Robert told me that he’d had his own epiphany about gratitude and work when he first moved to Los Angeles and got several jobs writing for network TV shows. They were the kind of high-paying, prestigious positions that a lot of people would kill for, but as a Princeton-educated, East Coast intellectual (he reads Chaucer for fun), he never quite saw the charm of his actual job, being story editor on the popular supernatural drama Charmed. He got frustrated sitting in the writers’ room for hours and hours, brainstorming plot details, and one day, after his team spent about ten hours (or at least it felt that way) discussing the characters’ motivation, Robert wanted to cast a spell and vanish into thin air.

  “We were writing a TV show about three pretty women who were witches. How much motivation did they need? I started feeling very sorry for myself. Like my life was being wasted,” he said.

  Tired and irritable, he went to the men’s room to splash cold water on his face. As he stared across the marble sink, a janitor came in, whistling happily, and as he wiped down the counter, he marveled to Robert about the beautiful day and how lucky they were to live in LA.

  “Uh, yuh,” Robert agreed, dabbing at his face with paper towels.

  Still whistling brightly, the janitor went off to clean the toilets, and Robert turned and glared at himself in the mirror.

  “I thought, You spoiled brat! I was probably earning more in an hour than that nice guy would make in a week, but he appreciated his job and I hated mine. What sense did it make that he was happier than me?”

  Robert realized that whether cleaning toilets or writing a TV show (and no jokes comparing them), the actual job mattered less than the attitude he brought to it. Most work had both pleasures and drudgery, and focusing on the positives could change an experience from misery to joy. Being bummed or charmed about writing for TV was really in his own control.

  “It was the kind of breakthrough realization you never forget,” Robert said. “And I probably went at least ten minutes without forgetting it. Then I was back at my desk and in a bad mood all over again. But at least I knew I shouldn’t be! That’s progress!”

  A couple of days after I spoke to Robert, I was contacted through my college alumni network by a guy in his early twenties who wanted career advice. I agreed to get together (who could say no?). He had what sounded like a solid first job at a digital advertising agency, but as we sipped our cafés au lait (my treat), he complained that the position wasn’t much fun and some days dragged.

  “That’s why it’s called ‘work,’” I said, trying to make a joke.

  “Yes, but I deserve better,” he said, not amused.

  Robert’s word “spoiled” flitted through my mind, but I pushed it aside. I had been enlisted for guidance, not moral judgment, so I talked about the exciting directions digital ads might go. Instead of picking up on my positive approach, he griped about his boss (“He thinks he’s so much smarter than me!”) and his many late nights at the office. By the time we got to his lack of an expense account (“I’m stuck at Chipotle every day!”), his sense of entitlement was too much for me.

  “You should be grateful to have this job at all!” I snapped.

  Even as I said it, I felt my hair turning gray and whiskers growing on my chin, since I had obviously turned into some long-forgotten Depression-era great-grandpa. Being grateful for a job had real resonance back then, when millions of people out of work lived on stale bread and tinned sardines. But gratitude for a job didn’t have much significance for a newly minted college grad with a supportive family (thank goodness for those) who thought he deserved to have fun from nine A.M. to five P.M.

  After I left, it occurred to me that maybe my comment wasn’t as old-fashioned as I feared. Men and women of all social and economic classes currently struggling to find work would, indeed, be grateful for a position, even if it wasn’t perfect. “I’ve had people with three PhDs sitting where you are, crying because they lost their job,” an office clerk told a social worker I knew as she submitted her unemployment papers. The anxiety remains for many, even if sardines don’t.

  But for those lucky enough not to have faced breadlines or collected unemployment insurance, gratitude for a job could be hard to find. When we asked people in the survey I did how grateful they were for a variety of things, “your current job” finished dead last. Only 39 percent expressed gratitude for their present employment. The number went way up for those who earned $150,000 or more, but even in that elite group, close to 40 percent said—nope, not grateful for my job. That’s a big enough number to suggest we need some global changes in how people are treated at work (and I’ll get to that). But as always, the main thing we can change, as my friend Robert realized, is our own approach.

  When my sons were growing up, they used to talk about “being like Jeremy.” They’d never met the guy, but they’d heard me talk about him (even back then) as an example of how to succeed in business by staying upbeat and grateful. At the time, I was the senior producer at a syndicated TV show and Jeremy was one of many summer interns we hired. With the relentless pace of a daily show, nobody had time to coddle them. Reporters asked them to pitch in with vital but humdrum tasks (Log in that tape! Grab me some research!), and the interns spent a lot of time huddled together complaining.

  All except Jeremy. He thanked us for letting him be at the show. He felt fortunate to be getting experience. When reporters rushed to cut tape and make air, Jeremy offered to help, even if it meant making a coffee run. One night when I stayed late on a story, he asked if he could hang around in the back of the edit room and watch.

  “You don’t have to,” I told him.

  “But I want to learn everything I can. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here,” he said.

  At the end of the summer, we barely knew most of the interns’ names, but we asked Jeremy if he’d drop out of college and come work full-time. He wisely didn’t, but after he graduated, his career in TV took off. His grateful style had enhanced, not undermined, his ambition. The unhappy interns might have had reason to grumble (getting coffee and logging tapes can be annoying), but what did they achieve? Jeremy flipped the experience to see the bright side and gained a whole career. It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to Jeremy, and for all I know, he might have left TV by now and taken up life as an organic farmer. But it wouldn’t matter. Everyone would want to pick fresh blueberries with him.

  Any job has its good points and bad, but focusing on the negatives promises only a sour experience. Making an effort to zero in on the pleasures (however hard to find) can make most jobs tolerably sweet. We all notice Jeremys when we meet them—whether it’s the one cheerful clerk at the drugstore or the helpful bus driver who reminds you of your stop. A positive spirit makes it more likely they’ll get promoted or find a better position—because being grateful and spreading good vibes makes others want to help.

  For some people, being upbeat comes naturally, but a lot of us have to work really hard at it. And that’s where gratitude techniques can help. I learned one of them from Emily Kirkpatrick, the
vice president of a nonprofit called the National Center for Families Learning, a literacy organization that I admired. Based in Louisville, Kentucky, Emily has three baby boys under age four (including adorable twins) and a husband with a high position in the state Republican Party. Passionate about both her family and her work, she often found herself too stressed to appreciate either one. “Optimism is not in my DNA,” she told me when we had coffee during one of her regular business trips.

  Driving home from the office most evenings, Emily found herself mulling over everything that had gone wrong in the day. Remember the psychologists who described the poisoned-berry theory of survival and how we’re genetically programmed to focus on whatever is bad or threatening? Emily had that ability to the max—she’d be a big winner in the primeval forest. But ruminating every night on the one bad event rather than the five positive ones left her tense. So enough. She decided to turn the twenty minutes in the car into a time to recount every good thing that had happened.

  “I had to fight at first to keep the right things in my mind,” she told me with a laugh. “But after a while it became more natural.” Instead of arriving home stressed and worried (as happens when you’ve focused on problems), the gratitude drive allowed her to decompress and get a positive mind-set. “I come into the house happier and filled with energy now, which is so much better for my children and me,” she said.

  Emily had done extremely well in her organization, but she had questions about the future—uncertainty about when the older president might step down, how the board would react, which direction politics might go. Would she leave at some point? Who knew? But now she consciously decided that even as she kept one eye on the future, the other would remain focused on being grateful for right now. Her twenty-minute gratitude drive each night was a clever way to do it. (If more people tried this approach, it might cut down on road rage, too.)