It is a lovely story. A broken body and a broken string. An artist grateful to make music with what he has left. The only problem is that I don’t think it ever happened. No music critic at the time reported on the incident, and the Houston Chronicle article appeared to be more urban legend than serious news.
But however the story started, it probably lingered because it (ahem) hit a chord. We all understand that life can be a struggle. Bodies get damaged and strings are broken, children are tragically lost and jobs unfairly stolen away. A lot doesn’t make sense. Gratitude helps you find meaning—and some version of contentment—in the chaos.
CHAPTER 13
The “Unselfie” Approach to Life
Grateful to see gratitude as an action, not just a feeling
Lucky to find the self-satisfying side of giving to others
Glad to see Grattitude everywhere (however it’s spelled)
As I sat in row A of an intimate Broadway theater called Circle in the Square, actor Hugh Jackman stood onstage, about five feet away from me. The play, called The River, had a quiet intensity, and an understated Jackman a riveting presence.
The show ended and the small cast took their bows—and then they returned to the stage.
“Is this anybody’s first time at a Broadway show?” Jackman asked, dropping the controlled character he’d been playing and returning to his charming, ebullient natural self. Two young women sitting together raised their hands and Jackman joked that the “Broadway virgins” didn’t know what came next but everybody else did. It was the time of year when actors stepped out of their roles to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS—an important charity that had the advantage of a lot of great-looking stars collecting for it. Jackman urged everyone to drop whatever cash they could in the buckets outside the theater and to buy the posters of The River that the cast had signed and were selling for a hundred dollars.
But then he flashed his irresistible smile and announced that to raise even more money, he would sell something that a cast member had worn. And no, not the red dress that his costar had on. (She gave an embarrassed smile.) He pointed to the top he’d been wearing in the last scene of the play.
“Shameless exploitation for a good cause! I’ll auction off this wet T-shirt I’m wearing, and the winner comes with me backstage!” He joked about a bed backstage (in the play, characters kept leaving for the unseen bedroom) and picked up a bottle of “wine” that was one of the stage props. “We’ll drink 2007 grape juice too!”
He started the bidding and the price quickly went up. “If you’re not bidding, this is a bad time to be fixing your hair!” he teased one woman in the audience, whose semi-raised hand caught his eye. He offered a second T-shirt to anyone who would match the top bid (then at $6,000) and invited fans willing to shell out $2,000 to come onstage for photos. Jackman was so charming that the woman behind me whispered, “Maybe I should break my piggy bank.”
Selling the shirt off his back wasn’t new for Jackman. When he starred in the sold-out, ten-week revue Hugh Jackman, Back on Broadway in 2011, he ended most of the performances by unbuttoning his white shirt and offering his sweaty T-shirt to the highest bidder. He’d even sign it. One night he had two bidders willing to pay $25,000 each. Over the course of the run, he raised nearly $1.8 million for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.
Would anyone have paid all that money for Jackson’s cast-offs if it weren’t for charity? Well, maybe. People can get a bit bonkers around Jackman. But making the auction about giving and caring removed the unseemliness of buying (and selling) a sweaty tee. And it also let Jackman bring a semblance of sense to the crazy experience of being idolized. Most stars tried to appreciate the infatuated fans who brought them money and fame, but they were also wary. No matter who you are or how long you’ve been beloved, having fervid fans who want to rip off your clothes never quite computes. Jackman’s genius was to show his gratitude for the fans’ love by turning it into something that also helped the world. I admired him as terrific actor and charismatic star, but I respected his pay-it-forward auction almost more than anything else I’d seen him do.
When I got home that night, I decided my goal this month would be to try to find the same joy in grateful giving that Hugh Jackman showed. I wanted to acquire his spirit even if I’d never come close to matching his charisma or talent. (Not to mention his muscular arms, great abs, lean body, twinkly eyes, graceful moves . . . Must I go on?) If I could find out what inspired some people to turn gratitude to giving, then maybe I could take pleasure in finding a bigger purpose.
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To get some ideas, I went to visit Henry Timms, a Hugh Jackman–level star in the nonprofit world and the kind of guy who has more ideas in an hour than most of us have in a week. Or maybe a lifetime. Impressively tall and broad shouldered, he talks fast, with an upscale English accent that makes him sound smarter to Americans. He looks like a guy who might have led both the computer club and the rugby team at an English boarding school.
Henry grew up in London, his father an English archaeologist and his mother a Texan. “She had the good sense to marry an Englishman, which I recommend to all women,” he said when we sat down in his office at 92Y, where he’s executive director.
Now in his late thirties, Henry was married with two young children—and he had plans to change the world by merging philanthropy with technology. Henry told me that he remembered coming to America every year at the holidays when he was young to visit his mother’s family. “It struck me as such an amazingly generous place, everything so alive and dynamic. We’d go to the Salvation Army in Austin, Texas, and they’d have a coat drive, and I was struck that caring and generosity was the heart of what this country was about.”
One of his big ideas came on Thanksgiving a few years ago. Sitting at the dining room table with his wife, he wondered why a holiday season that started with “thanks” and “giving” didn’t pay attention to either of those concepts. Instead, we had Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which were all about buying.
And so was born the idea of #Giving Tuesday.
I’d known Henry for a few years—neither of us could remember how we first met since he’s just one of those guys who attract people—and I had attended a few of the early meetings he held about #Giving Tuesday. He liked to put people with different backgrounds in a room, throw out a general concept, and see where it went.
Within two years, #Giving Tuesday had attracted thousands of corporations and nonprofits eager to participate. I had told Henry before how proud he should be that his idea evolved so far, so fast. He stood as proof of the power of one person to have a huge impact on the world.
“I’d like to resist the heroic narrative,” he said to me now, when I brought up his accomplishments again. “I know it’s an interesting story when the dynamic leader dreams up an idea at the kitchen table. But it’s not even true.”
“As I remember, it was the dining room table,” I teased.
Henry shook his head, reluctant to present himself as the centerpiece of the movement. To him, that was the nexus of “old power”—one person creating a program that others absorbed and followed. He wanted to model “new power,” where instead of coming from the top down, an idea spread by a community of people sharing and caring. “We want to create a space where people can share values, which is how an idea becomes self-sustaining,” he said.
The shared values in this case revolved around gratitude and giving. Making a connection between them resulted in a (hopefully) endless positive loop—you could show gratitude by giving, and giving led to more gratitude.
“Gratitude isn’t just a nice feeling. Gratitude at its best is an action. It’s about something you do rather than just something you feel. Americans are very good at that,” Henry said.
Americans can also be very good at self-absorption—as evidenced by the proliferation of people using their phones to take
photos of themselves. In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year was “selfie.” That same year, the “unselfie” went viral on #Giving Tuesday. While the selfie is all about me, the unselfie was me caring about someone else. Some were as simple as people posting pictures on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram of themselves holding a sign about the cause they wanted to support or how they would feed the world. The Huffington Post called it “the antithesis of social media navel gazing.”
It’s possible to be divisive and corrosive on social media, but the fast-moving formats also make it exponentially easier to be grateful and compassionate. “There are ways to use the tools of social media to celebrate the best of who we are as human beings,” Henry Timms said. “Unselfies are literal snapshots of a person being grateful.”
Henry described gratitude as a muscle that we all need to flex, so I told him about my year of living gratefully and how much I’d changed. He nodded thoughtfully. I could see the idea-generating mind at work.
“You need some dramatic transformation for the end of your book,” he said. “A whole year of gratitude needs something big. It should feel like the ending of a movie. Maybe you should become a nun?”
I admire Henry so much that for a moment, I took it seriously. But, nope, I had a husband and two kids. The convent thing wouldn’t work.
“Keep thinking. I like the concept, but preferably a transformation that doesn’t involve a vow of chastity,” I said.
We both laughed and I left Henry’s office with an extra bounce in my step. After these many months of gratitude, those children and husband plus work and friends made me more satisfied than ever. Gratitude had changed me and a few people around me, but maybe it could have bigger repercussions, too. By its very nature, gratitude created an “unselfie” approach to daily life, making you turn the camera lens around and focus outward instead of inward. Appreciating the world around you made you more eager to be part of making it better.
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I liked Henry’s idea of flexing the gratitude muscle by giving, but knowing just how to do that was a little trickier. Back in about 350 BC, Aristotle pointed out that gratitude is felt toward him who gives, and in his famous treatise on ethics, he advised it was virtuous and noble to give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time, with all the other qualifications that accompany right giving. Maybe knowing “right” was simpler then.
Since the time of Aristotle, other philosophers have outlined all the just and rational reasons (and there are many of them) to help people in need. But psychologists (and most fund-raisers) know that on a practical basis, none of these moral principles have much to do with why we actually give. In one study, people were presented with various sad scenarios—such as three million people in an African country underfed or millions having to flee their homes—and asked how much they would contribute. Then they heard one person’s story. They typically offered three times as much to the beleaguered individual as they did to the tragic, global problem. Of the many explanations, I think the simplest is this: When face-to-face with another person, we recognize our own good fortune and know the random hand of fate could just as easily have taken a quarter turn in a different direction. Grateful? You betcha.
Back in the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith pretty much launched modern economics when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations that people are motivated by their own self-interest. He explained that if we want something from a tradesman (“the butcher, the brewer, or the baker”), we should “never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” And that was okay. Pursuing our own personal gain ultimately served the good of society.
Conservative politicians regularly quote Smith, the free-markets-benefit-everyone guy. But it turns out Adam Smith was also the gratitude guy. He started out as a moral philosopher, and his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, focused on social relationships and our drive to lead moral lives. He argued that we have natural inclinations toward sympathy and kindness, and we care about the happiness of others. He defined the worst in human nature as resentment and the best as gratitude.
In elegant eighteenth-century prose, Smith described gratitude as the emotion that prompts us to show our most admirable natures. He said we feel “grateful affection” when someone helps us, and so we want to return the favor and do good for another person. As observers, we admire people who help (they “stand before us in the most engaging and amiable light”), and all the giving and thanking and gratitude make for a nicer society. “The sentiment which most immediately and directly prompts us to reward is gratitude,” he wrote.
Thinking about it now, I understood how the great Adam Smith could trumpet gratitude and giving on one hand and self-interest on the other—because sometimes, they could be the same thing. Giving made you feel good, which made it the ultimate in self-interest.
I got in touch with Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s popular show Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! We’d spoken in the past, and I always found him as quick and funny in real life as on the air. But he had a serious, thoughtful side, too. I’d recently heard him tell a moving story about his experience at the Boston Marathon the year the tragic bombings occurred. An avid runner, Sagal had just crossed the finish line and was standing one hundred yards from the first explosion. The bomb detonated at four hours nine minutes and Sagal typically finished a marathon an hour faster than that—so he should have been far away. But instead of trying for his own best time, he had run that year as a volunteer aide to a blind runner.
Sagal told me now that despite the drama of the day, he’d continued as a volunteer runner the next year and planned to do it yet again. He was happy to have traded improving his time for helping someone else. “Running is pretty solipsistic and self-oriented,” he said. “As with a lot of other activities, once you’ve achieved the goal you set, it doesn’t feel so important. I’d like to say that I conceived the notion of becoming a guide out of my own sense of enlightenment—but really, I got an e-mail asking if I would, and it struck me as a good way to remotivate myself.” And it worked. That race in Boston was his tenth marathon—and his slowest time. It was also the race that (up to that point) made him the happiest.
With his radio show a big hit, Sagal had become a celebrity in Chicago and nationally among NPR listeners. I asked if his volunteer runs were done in a pay-it-forward spirit of giving back to the community. I could practically hear him wrinkling his nose.
“I don’t know why the pay-it-forward thing bugs me,” he said. “It’s a wonderful idea—you’ve been given something, now give to someone else. But there’s something transactional that bothers me. What I find compelling, instead, is the simple joy I get from being of service without expecting anything back. When you give without wanting a return, you actually get a huge return. So it’s very selfish of me to do this! In a weird way, it’s a little bit like running. I do it because it makes me feel better.”
I laughed because it didn’t seem weird at all. Adam Smith had been onto the giving-is-getting game a few centuries ago (though without the marathons).
“The things I’ve done in my life that have been of service to individuals—and there have not been enough of them—have given me great satisfaction in the way that other things don’t,” Sagal said. Then he added, “Did you get the part—there have not been enough of them? Please write that down.”
Adam Smith would surely include Peter Sagal’s aiding a blind runner in his category of “good conduct” and therefore worthy of gratitude and reward. If Sagal did it for the personal satisfaction or to get over the hump of training, then bravo for him. The epiphany that helping someone else made you feel good yourself might get others to do the same. Self-interest? Good plan.
Intrigued to connect with others who did one-to-one service, I hopped on a train to see Dr. Andrew Jacono, a plastic surgeon who helped victims of domestic violence by providing reconstructive surgery at no fee,
giving them back their dignity along with their cheekbones. I knew he also spent several weeks a year in foreign countries, performing cleft-palate surgery for needy children.
If I hadn’t known his background, I would not have pegged Dr. Jacono as an exemplar of gratitude and giving. In his early forties, with thick dark hair, white teeth, and smooth, taut skin, he looked like someone on a reality TV show. But his success was much more than skin-deep. He built a twelve-thousand-square-foot plastic surgery center and spa in an upscale community on Long Island, and clients flew in to see him from all over the country and the world—including China, Singapore, Paris, and Spain.
“I never imagined it would be this way,” he said when we sat together in his elegant environs.
He told me that he’d picked his career in third grade when he sat next to a girl with a cleft palate on the school bus. He tried to be nice, but the other kids were horribly mean, throwing gum at her face and calling her names. Then she had surgery and everything changed. People liked her. The bullying stopped. He dreamed about becoming the miracle-making surgeon who could remake fate.
But Dr. Jacono didn’t grow up in a wealthy family, and becoming a sought-after plastic surgeon never seemed in the cards. People discouraged him at every step, saying it was too difficult to get into medical school or he was crazy to start a private practice or he’d go broke building his own surgery center. Somehow, he pulled it all off. “We all like to think it’s our own talents that make us successful, but I think it’s much more important to have passion and purpose and be relentless in the pursuit of what matters to you,” he said.
However he struggled for his self-made success, Dr. Jacono was grateful to be in a position to turn the tables and help others. “I do believe that we’re all connected and the more you give in your life, the more you get back,” he said. He told me that while he loved the work he did every day (no disparaging those paying clients), the volunteer activities sustained his soul.
The Gratitude Diaries Page 22
