Tom Gilovich, the psychology professor at Cornell, said, “We strive to have great things, and then once we get them they’re not so joyous. That’s the downside of habituation.” The achievements that make you happy at one point quickly need to be replaced by bigger and better ones, and that’s true no matter what your field. If you have a small sales territory, you want to expand it. If you’re running the division, you want to be running the company. But the position you yearn for may not be quite so satisfying once it’s yours. As far as I could tell, the only way to avoid what Gilovich called “the remarkable power of adaptation” was with a big dose of gratitude for the right now.
When I got home from talking to Emily, I noticed a photo on my bookshelf taken on a triumphant night when I was the executive producer of The TV Guide Awards Show, then a big two-hour special on the Fox network. (We even had advertising on the Super Bowl that first year.) In the picture, I’m posed on the red carpet, slim as a reed, wearing a $12,000 silver-beaded dress borrowed from the designer and sparkling diamonds lent by a fancy jeweler on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. My husband, handsome and equally dapper in a well-fitting tuxedo, has his arm around me. I’m smiling and look happy. But studying it now, I wondered—did I know to be grateful that night? I definitely appreciated the publicist who had snared me the diamonds, but mostly, my mind stayed focused on my obligations to the show and whether the ratings would live up to expectations. If I’d been keeping a gratitude diary that night, maybe I could have appreciated the good events a bit more as they happened. It would be a shame if gratitude for our careers existed only in the rearview mirror.
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So how do we learn to appreciate the jobs we have now? There’s certainly no question that it’s worth trying, and no question that it’s hard. An executive recruiter told me that he has started to encourage his clients to appreciate the job they’re currently in and have faith that the next one will appear.
“You can almost hear the bell ring when they move from grateful to entitled, and all that does is piss off everyone they work with,” he said.
He told me about one young finance guy who was so pleased when the recruiter helped him land a position that he sent a bottle of scotch in thanks. But he didn’t drink it too quickly, since the guy began calling him regularly and asking what he could get next that would feel bigger, better, richer.
“I’ve been around long enough that I wanted to say, ‘Hey, appreciate the job you have now because it may not last.’ But nobody believes that.”
I’d been thinking about gratitude when I watched the Winter Olympics earlier, because sports should be one area where achievement is pretty clear—you win gold, silver, bronze, or nothing at all. But the athletes’ reactions at the end of an event seemed to have less to do with how they finished than with how they expected to finish. Some of the bronze medalists beamed and waved on the medal stand, thrilled to be there. Many knew that another hundredth of a second or so and they would have missed medaling at all. But certain second-place finishers looked devastated. World figure-skating champion Yuna Kim of South Korea had expected gold, so the silver medal around her neck probably felt like a lump of coal. Whether in sports or life, our attitude is affected by what might have been.
Back in 1892, the great psychologist William James understood that we live by comparisons rather than absolutes. He wrote about “the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing.” An athlete can choose to look up at what she missed (like the gold medal) and feel defeated, or look down at others who achieved less and feel victorious.
Flipping regret to gratitude can be a matter of changing your basis for comparison. I watched a Canadian freestyle skier named Alex Bilodeau take a near-perfect run—then rush over to hug his disabled brother, Frederic, who stood on the sidelines, cheering wildly. Alex later told reporters that he felt lucky to be healthy and able to go after his dreams, while Frederic, who could barely walk, didn’t have that chance. Gratitude for what you have doesn’t come more heart wrenching than that. Or as life coach Tony Robbins regularly says at his famed weekend immersion seminars (meant to “unleash the power within”), if you trade your expectations for appreciation, the world instantly changes.
Athletes and stars who show a genuinely grateful side are endlessly appealing, as I discovered the year the popular TV show Seinfeld ended its network run. With his fame reaching crazy heights, Jerry Seinfeld had decided to step back and not do many interviews. But I had a prime-time network special on the fifty best TV shows of all time to produce, and I chose Seinfeld as number one.
When I called to let him know, Jerry sounded humble and gracious, saying how honored he was for the tribute. He marveled that his show had beaten out classics like The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy that he had watched as a child. Jerry agreed to appear on the special.
The day of our interview, he arrived at the studio all alone, no publicist, no entourage.
“Hi,” he said, walking in the door. “Am I in the right place?”
The guy coming in looked very familiar to me, but for a moment, I couldn’t place him. Had we gone to high school together? Summer camp? Oh, wait, of course. I felt a shimmer of recognition. Jerry Seinfeld had arrived. I’d watched him on TV for so long that he felt like an old friend.
He gave me a terrific interview and seemed deeply moved and appreciative. The number one ranking had the imprimatur of TV Guide (still a big deal back then), and Jerry marveled that he’d grown up reading it, so the next day, I sent him a big basket filled with TV Guide paraphernalia—umbrellas, mugs, T-shirts, sweatshirts, and even a little clock. I included a note that I was giving him a lifetime subscription to the magazine. He had just refused $5 million an episode to continue Seinfeld for a tenth season (and would eventually earn $3 billion in syndication) and surely didn’t need my free subscription. But later that afternoon, my phone rang, and when I picked it up, someone said, “Hey, it’s Jerry. Thanks for all the stuff you sent.” He wanted to give me his home address to receive the magazine subscription.
“Let me say again how much I appreciate your faith in me,” he said in that familiar voice that made anything sound funny. “Your calling Seinfeld the best show of all time makes me very happy.”
My friend Lynn happened to be in my office that afternoon, and when I hung up, she stared at me.
“Was that Jerry Seinfeld calling to give you his home address?” she asked.
“Actually, he called to say thank you.”
“I can’t believe he called!” she said.
I agreed it seemed a bit surreal to have Jerry Seinfeld being grateful to . . . me. It was probably the first time I understood that even someone as hugely successful as Jerry Seinfeld cared about being appreciated. With his willingness to say thanks, my admiration for him soared even higher.
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Trying to be grateful for your job is almost as tricky as being grateful for your spouse—because we have excessively complicated expectations for both. Just as we want the person we marry to be our lover, best friend, social partner, personal adviser, and soul mate, we similarly overburden a job. We want it to provide a good salary, a sense of identity, a community of colleagues, an understanding boss, a chance to make a difference, and an affirmation that what we do matters. Oh, and an easy commute. That helps too.
We launch into marriage with at least the expectation of “forever,” but we have no such myths around a job. We’ll stay until something better (hopefully) comes along. But this month, I came to understand that being grateful for your current job doesn’t make you less ambitious. It just makes you happier—and probably more productive—in the moment. You can be grateful for the now of your career—and still soar in the future.
Tweeting every day with my friend Robert about our careers had been a nice id
ea, but we hadn’t followed through. (Not everything pans out.) Instead, I’d used my gratitude journal this month to write reasons why I felt grateful to be a writer. I had a lot of entries, and as the month neared its end, I wondered if I would run out of reasons before I ran out of days. But one morning, I went to my desk in our apartment and started working on my book proposal—and the next thing I knew, it was three in the afternoon. Positive psychologists refer to that as “flow”—the exhilarating feeling of getting so immersed in an activity that you don’t notice anything else. It can happen when you’re painting, sewing, solving a math problem, creating a computer program, running, reading, doing yoga . . . just about anything that gets you fully involved. That night’s journal entry would be easy. The next day, writing felt a little bumpier. But by the afternoon, I had finished what I needed to, and I looked down and smiled. I took out my journal again.
So grateful I get to work all day in furry slippers and pajamas! I wrote.
Maybe it wasn’t earth-shattering, but we all have more reasons than we realize to be grateful for what we do.
CHAPTER 8
Getting Thanks (and No Thanks) at Work
Grateful to talk to the CEO who wrote 30,000 thank-you notes
Grateful to have received a thank-you myself from Clint Eastwood
Lucky to meet the Wharton professor who says gratitude is a good business move
Now that I could think about having gratitude for my job, what about a little gratitude from the job? Good luck with that. Going back to my survey, I discovered that expressions of gratitude were as scarce around most workplaces as the proverbial hens’ teeth. Only 7 percent of people regularly said thanks to their bosses and 10 percent to colleagues. “Thanks”—whether sent up, down, or sideways—was rarely heard.
When Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues at Princeton looked at the daily activities that put people in a lousy mood (or cause “negative affect,” as the academics say), they found that spending time with a boss topped the list. I can understand it—because who would want to spend time with someone who never appreciates what they do? Bosses who avoid expressing gratitude at work are wrong on so many counts that I hardly know where to begin. But some more of those survey findings make the point:
81 percent of people said they would work harder for a more grateful boss.
70 percent would feel better about themselves if a boss expressed gratitude.
Being appreciated is one of the great motivators on the job—even better than money. Researchers at the London School of Economics analyzed more than fifty studies that looked at what gets people charged up at work, and they concluded that you’ll give your best effort if the work gets you interested and excited, if you feel that it’s providing meaning and purpose, and if others appreciate what you’re doing. Financial incentives can actually have a negative impact. You need to start with a fair salary, but being given direct payoffs for performance can undermine the intrinsic and personal motivations that really make us want to give our all.
Some tough-minded executives withhold saying thanks to the people who work for them because they worry that gratitude makes them seem less powerful. My friend Beth Schermer, an executive coach and consultant in Phoenix, Arizona, told me that she tries to encourage managers to show gratitude all the time. “But the comment we hear is ‘I say thank you to my employees every week. It’s called a paycheck,’” she said.
Beth has handled major political projects and smaller corporate ones, and she’s masterful at getting people to work together. An energetic redhead with an endearing smile, she has a genial style that is matched by her summa cum laude intelligence. But the “paycheck” comment is a nonstarter. As soon as someone tells her that, she knows she’s in for a challenge. Beth often advises CEOs to start all difficult interactions with “thank you,” because there must be something the person has done right. “It usually makes the conversation go better, even if you’re firing them,” she said.
Even if a boss thinks otherwise, gratitude usually turns out to be a smart career move. In our survey, 96 percent of people agreed that a grateful boss is most likely to be successful, since people will rally behind her. Execs who assume that saying thank you or appreciating someone’s work lessens their power are missing the point. Nobody gets to the top on their own. If you help enough people and give them positive feedback, there’s a good chance they’ll turn around and help you out, too.
Adam Grant, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, divides people into three categories—givers, takers, and matchers. Takers try to get other people to serve their needs, and matchers always play a corporate quid pro quo—they’ll help someone if they think they’ll get an advantage in return. Givers contribute to others without looking for a reward, and they’ll offer help, advice, and knowledge, share valuable contacts, and make introductions. In a dog-eat-dog situation, that givingness sounds like it could hold someone back, and sometimes it does backfire. But Grant found that givers can also end up on top of the heap. Those who combine giving to others with an awareness of their own needs can be the most successful on all fronts. They benefit others and advance their own interests, too.
Grant is the perfect role model for how a grateful and giving soul can end up a big star. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, completed his PhD in three years, and became the youngest full professor at Wharton (he got the position in his twenties and is still in his early thirties). His list of consulting clients includes America’s coolest companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Pixar—as well as the World Economic Forum (and many more). He’s one of the most popular teachers at Wharton, and his office hours can stretch for three or four hours since he will tirelessly give advice, answer questions, provide contacts from his huge network, and write recommendations.
Known for his willingness to help people, Grant had an almost legendary reputation for promptly responding to the two hundred or three hundred e-mails he received every day, a large percentage from people he’d never met. Having heard about his giving attitude, people asked him for connections, recommendations, ideas, and jobs. But when I first tried to reach him, an automatic reply popped back, explaining that he now got thousands of requests a day and simply couldn’t answer all of them. The instructive e-mail offered general advice and links to some of the articles he’d written. Apparently, becoming famous as the guy who helped everyone required some boundaries.
I called some friends at Wharton to get a more direct connection, but before I could try it, Grant had already replied to my original request. Yes, he’d be happy to talk about gratitude with me (“Your book sounds wonderful,” he said graciously), and he offered three different times that he was available to connect. Did any of them work for me? After I picked one, he confirmed almost immediately.
Usually I approach interviews as just casual conversations, but with the hyperorganized and efficient Grant, I wanted to be as prepared as he was (probably impossible—I could never match his extraordinary memory). I worked myself into a mild frenzy rereading his research articles and his interesting book Give and Take and writing out my list of questions. But I didn’t have to worry.
“I know it’s ironic for me to thank you for writing on gratitude, but it’s a big and neglected topic—so thank you. I’m so glad you’re doing it,” he said two minutes into the conversation.
Bingo! The Professor of Giving was quick to give thanks—and of course I believed him. It made us both feel good—and reflected the kind of comment Grant thinks could transform the business world. People want to feel valued as human beings and will respond with greater creativity, engagement, and persistence when they feel other people are grateful for their contributions.
“A sense of appreciation is the single most sustainable motivator at work,” Grant told me. “Extrinsic motivators can stop having much meaning—your raise in pay feels like your just due, your bonus gets spent
, your new title doesn’t sound so important once you have it. But the sense that other people appreciate what you do sticks with you.”
So if gratitude makes people work harder and gives bosses a successful edge, why aren’t companies havens of happy thanks-giving? It comes down to the same “we pay them with a paycheck” attitude that my friend Beth tries to fight. Grant said it was part of the old Protestant work ethic (or whatever ethnicity currently takes credit/blame) that says our expected role is to get stuff done, so why bother thanking someone? And there remains the problem of credit-grabbing, I’m-in-control-here managers who don’t want to look like they need anyone else. “The problem with this excuse is that it’s simply false,” Grant told me. “There’s a difference between being dependent on someone else and valuing what others contribute and who they are.”
Early in his career (not that he’s yet close to late in his career, or even in the middle), Grant consulted for a college call center where students spent hours on the phone, trying to raise money. Most alumni have a simple answer when they’re asked for a donation—they say no—and being regularly rejected was dispiriting for the callers. Trying to figure out what could keep them motivated, Grant asked a student who had received a scholarship through alumni donations to come in and talk with the callers. The results were remarkable. After getting face-to-face thanks and seeing that their work had genuine impact, the callers were reenergized. They upped their efforts—and the average money they brought in went from about $400 to more than $2,000. That’s five times as much in donations. From a thank-you.
“It’s one thing to think that your job has a purpose, and it’s another to meet a specific person who cares, appreciates, and values what you do,” Grant told me. “The call center people got a new sense of their worth—not only on the job but as individuals.”
The Gratitude Diaries Page 13