SDS 116: The Power of Gratitude

 Welcome everybody to the SuperDataScience podcast, today we’ve got an episode about gratitude. I’ve wanted to record an episode like this for a while but recently I was re-inspired to do this while listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcast, the episode with Tim Urban. Actually, Tim Ferriss has a new book that came out, it’s called Tribe of Mentors and also, he has a podcast, Tribe of Mentors, and episode number nine over there is with Tim Urban from “Wait but Why.” So, two very exciting and interesting people, both of the same name Tim, got together to record a fantastic episode. Highly recommended, we’ll link to it in the show notes or just google Tim Ferriss, Tim Urban podcast or Tribe of Mentors.

 Basically, in one part of the podcast towards the end, they were talking about happiness and what makes people happy, what constitutes happiness. I really liked some of the notions they mentioned. Tim Urban brought up this notion that there is micro-happiness and macro-happiness. Micro-happiness is kind of lifestyle and, as he put it, how you crush your Tuesdays, how you make every day happen and what you do inside the day and what makes you happy. Whereas macro-happiness is overall your life and where it’s going and are you doing the thing that you want to be doing? Are you doing what you’re passionate about? Are you satisfied with the trajectory of your life overall? The overall happiness, the macro-happiness is very important, and Tim recommends that as the place to start to make sure that everything is on track because if you’re not doing what you’re passionate about, if you’re not doing what you want to do overall, you can have micro-happiness but it’s going to be much harder. You’re going to still always have this gloomy cloud over your head.

 But in terms of generally happiness, what I really found interesting is that one of the keys to happiness seems like it’s gratitude. This is a recurring theme, not just with Tim Ferriss, Tim Urban but also, I’ve heard the same thing from Tony Robbins and from other entrepreneurs and other motivational speakers out there. For instance, what Tony Robbins recommends is every time in the morning, and Hadelin and I did this on our road trip, every time in the morning when you wake up, he actually has a priming exercise if you google, Morning Priming Exercise by Tony Robbins. He helps you think the things that you’re grateful for, why you are excited about life, what are you thankful for that has happened to you or that you have or some coincidences that happened in your life. And he does this every morning of his life and Hadelin and I did it for a good couple of months, maybe two or three months. It really helps because it puts you in the mood of being grateful, and when you’re grateful for something, you can’t be angry, you can’t be sad, you can’t be unhappy. Just like that whole concept of being grateful, being thankful completely shifts the course of your day. That’s the Tony Robbins take on it.

 In terms of what Tim Urban mentioned, what I liked was that the analogy or the metaphor. For instance, you could compare yourself now to where you were five years ago. You might have much more success, many more things, much better health even, you might have just generally your life quality might be much better, but you still could be as unhappy as you were. And the reason for that phenomenon is that we constantly look up, we constantly look up and think of the things that we don’t have. Instead of being grateful for the things that we do have, we think of the things that we’re missing, we think of the things that are not in our lives and we want them, and we aspire to get them. And we constantly look up and try to reach for, whether it’s for the stars or for new careers, new successes, new relationships, new experiences and so on, more money and things like that. We constantly look up and reach up for more and that way we’re just seeing things we don’t have.

 But what if we looked down at the mountain of things that we do have, and all of the things that we’ve accomplished, all of the things that we’ve achieved and things that we’ve gotten, things that we do have in our lives? Things that have come to us, the coincidences that have brought things to us. What he says is that that way you will see that this mountain of things is growing. If you keep looking up, there’s always going to be things you don’t have but if you look down occasionally, you will see that there is this mountain of, not necessarily physical things, but a mountain of metaphorical things that you have in your life. Your life quality, how you’ve grown, how you’ve developed, and all these other things, if you look down, then you’ll see all of that, and that will bring you happiness. The exercise that he suggests, and that psychologists suggest is at the end of every day, to write down the three things that you’re grateful for. At the end of every day, write down three things that you’re thankful for that happened to you today or that you did today. What that does is it trains your brain to think what’s good instead of thinking what’s missing, what do I need more, where do I need to go and so on. That is also necessary. At times it is necessary to define your strategic approach or define where you’re going, understand what you want from life, but also, it’s important not to forget to see what you have. That’s why he suggests writing these three things down so your brain is trained to think what’s good. If you keep doing that, your brain will be like, what’s good, what’s good, what’s good? And it won’t just do that at the end of the day, it’ll be conditioned to do that all the time. As you go through your day you’ll think about, okay, what’s good? What’s actually good? And instead of like, I’ve got to get there, and I can do this and that and this, you’ll be like, actually, what is good right now? And that will put a smile on your face.

 There you go, that’s a quick note. Make sure to check out that episode. If you’re interested to learn more, they discuss some very interesting other topics as well, including artificial intelligence. In general, let’s give this a go, let’s all agree that today before you go to bed, you write down the top three things that you are grateful for that happened to you today and let’s see how that goes.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope you’re going to be even more happy after realizing all the things that you have already. I can’t wait to see you next time; until then, happy analysing.