3 posts tagged “gratitude”

this is originally from 2003 - condensed for posting, you'll want to see the whole thing:

I’m not going to go all Miss Manners on your ass and get into the social intricacies and delicate situations that surround thank-you note writing, as I was taught that a solid thank-you note will transcend all complicated situations – and I have seen no evidence to the contrary.

There is a six-point formula to the proper thank-you: Learn it, know it, memorize it – and it will never fail you.

1. Greet the Giver

2. Express Your Gratitude

3. Discuss Use

4. Mention the Past, Allude to the Future

5. Grace

6. Regards

here's some things I'm happy for today.

My weekend looks like it will be full of seeing people - Deb has arranged a couple of things, and I was invited to Barbara and Gavin's 4th of July party.  That should be all very nice.  I'm grateful for the opportunity not to have to plan very much and for things still to happen.

Jon Udell and Lou Rosenfeld had a great conversation podcast:

Lou Rosenfeld is my guest for this week's podcast. Fellow superpatron Edward Vielmetti put me in touch with Lou, with whom I share an affection not only for Ann Arbor, Michigan, but also for a cluster of topics including information architecture, search analytics, print and online publishing, designing for usability, tagging, and microformats. We had a great conversation!

Well worth a listen.

Alan Gutierrez in New Orleans (via Ann Arbor) has connected up with the folks at Xavier University there to teach web publishing courses.  Alan's Think New Orleans wiki was a rally point during the evacuation of Xavier during Katrina; it's good to see that go full circle.  I'm grateful to Alan for his tireless efforts in getting into the streets and neighborhoods of New Orleans and giving people there their own voice on the net.

I'm happy that I got some time to be offline today and to write things that are longer than three paragraphs and unlikely to see the light of day for weeks or months.  It expands my thinking to not always be reacting to the latest message but instead to wander through my own words first.

thanks

There is something quite marvelous and magical about throwing a few words into a search engine, getting back some hits, and then finding out a few clicks later that the thing that you have been interested in for a long time is being studied not 500 feet from where you work and recognizing a face from the group picture as someone you talked to yesterday.  (Ah, a little bit more digging shows that the project is moving to North Carolina from Michigan, but still.)

The particular area of interest is positive psychology - the study of happiness - and the positive benefits of emotions like joy, interest, contentment, love, pride, elevation, and gratitude.  So much psychology focuses narrowly on pathology that it's nice in so many ways to see a focus on what's good.

Here's a piece of an interview with Barbara Fredrickson on "Why it's good to feel good" .

S&S: You have hypothesized that from an evolutionary standpoint, positive emotions enabled us to thrive by broadening our thinking, allowing us to build resources, and enabling us to reach innovative solutions. This certainly would seem to make sense, given the conditions that our ancestors faced. How are positive emotions beneficial now?

BF: Resilience to stress and adversity is critical. When people get on track of being resilient, they are better able to find meaning in things. In an experiment we just carried out, we had one group of college students who recorded the positive meaning they found in daily events. We found that doing this on a daily basis did increase positive emotions, did increase resilience, and led to lower levels of depression, compared to a group of students who did not note the positive meaning they found in their experiences.

Hm, maybe if Vox always frames questions in a positive light it can contribute to the happiness of its users.