Gratitude = Success

Introduction: Below we’ll explore the real secret to success: “gratitude.” We’ll start by introducing and defining “success,” and then explore one fictional yet relevant scenario, showcasing the importance of gratitude for unlocking success. The scenario will have two opposing responses: “The ungrateful approach,” and “the grateful approach.” In comparing the two, we can better determine how we approach success and gratitude on a daily basis, and what this means for our future.

What is Success? Life’s complexities are often simple at their core. When we unravel such simplicities, we can often achieve great results. Success is a very complex topic, encompassing management techniques, strategic ingenuity, and even our work-life balance. Yet at its core, success is only a perception; a belief that “I’m getting what I need.”

Studies show that the internal embodiment of a simple feeling can increase the likelihood of corresponding actuality. “The Luck Factor,” by Richard Wiseman, for instance, shows a direct correlation between fortunate events, and individuals who “feel lucky.” Picture a cocky youngster, with pep in their step, and in internal belief that they’re somehow “special.” Compare that cocky youngster with a depressed ex-convict who’s “seen it all” and seriously doubts that they’ll live past 50. If you place a hundred dollar bill face down on a sidewalk, near both of their homes, the cocky youngster is far more likely to find that hundred dollar bill than the depressed ex-convict. There are scientific reasons for this, and I’d suggest reading “The Luck Factor” to learn about them. So how can we “feel successful” and crack life’s code for success, when feeling successful doesn’t come naturally? Success is only a “feeling” we get, and we should be able to control our feelings, which makes success hackable, right? Well what are we trying to hack? What does success even feel like? I imagine the rush of adrenaline and dopamine from winning the lottery, getting your favorite celebrity to sign a photograph, or retiring somewhere lavish. Those are all great pictures we can envision, but “believing” that they’ll happen is an entirely different matter.

It can be especially damaging to us when we expect success to come our way, and place our faith in the prospect of success, only to have that prospect ripped away from us. Maybe you have an affirmation journal, you write in it daily that you’ll “get promoted after eight months.” You try to believe in that promotion, envision that promotion, and you even work overtime to get that promotion, yet it never happens. You might be devastated, your confidence set back years. Now what?

Self help gurus will say “believe in yourself.” Yet, alone, we’re not powerful enough to believe in, are we? The only power we really have is the power to choose how we’ll respond to circumstances, and even then, everyone has their limits in terms of response bandwidth. The humblest person can be driven to anger, the most patient person can be brought to the brink of despair, and the wisest among us can be rushed into hasty decision-making. Feeling successful will definitely help us attain future success, but what do we do if our life hasn’t aligned itself with what we’d consider successful?

My suggestion is to lower your standards. Your health, your family, and your friends are all blessings which far outweigh “winning the lottery, getting your favorite celebrity to sign a photograph, or retiring somewhere lavish.” You have the ability to feel successful right now, and that ability simply comes with two ingredients: gratitude and compassion. You probably don’t need as much money, accolades, or praise as you think you do to start appreciating those things. That way you feel when you’re down - guess what? Other people have been there and you’re not the only one. The most notable humans experience tough times, and there are plenty of notable humans who aren’t noted by history or society at large. Don’t judge yourself based on your outward accomplishments, in fact don’t judge yourself at all. You’ll always have something to appreciate around you, even something as simple as clean air. Nobody can articulate what success should look like in your life, and nobody can place themselves in your shoes to determine how well you’ve handled yourself. There is no “real” metric system for ranking merit, and even the most experienced psychologists aren’t qualified to grade your life’s performance in comparison to someone else. There is no telling what I would do were I to grow up in your shoes, experiencing your emotions, and dealing with the complex set of cards you’ve been dealt. With this in mind, we should take a breath, and assume people are flawed but trying their best. If we can put ourselves in a headspace where we stop judging books by their cover, we can start seeing the potential for good in everything around us. I surmise that having a healthy and compassionate outlook equates to “gratitude.” As we value and savor the world around us (gratitude), we see opportunity all around us (potential for success). An athletic talent scout, for instance, who is grateful for their job, and enjoys working with athletes, is far more likely to find raw talent in unexpected places than a talent scout who just wants to get home and collect a paycheck. The less optimistic talent scout will likely avoid unranked athletes, missing out on a variety of commonly overlooked attributes. Gratitude shows us the value in our every-day circumstances, and that value leads to opportunity. Introverts, as a rough example, might make fewer friends, simply because they don’t appreciate opportunities to socialize. And similarly, we’ll find it hard to succeed at anything at all if we don’t appreciate our daily routines. Our attitude is everything when it comes to success. Below we’ll explore how a simple “gratitude adjustment” could change the scope of your entire career.

Ungrateful Approach:

You wake up wishing you could just stay in bed and stream your favorite show. The thought of “another day at the office” makes you want to gag. You close your eyes and wake up again to your snoozed alarm clock’s beeping, rushing out the door, and forgetting to brew your morning tea. You get a flat tire on your way to work. “Of course” you tell yourself. You see an old college roommate at the tire shop, but avoid chatting with them, knowing they had a tendency to ramble-on.

You make it into the office, noticing you have hundreds of unopened emails and a lengthy meeting to get through. “Typical” you think, as you try feverishly to rush through each and every email in your inbox before the meeting starts. "Some of your responses were very curt,” your supervisor said, before demanding you to be more considerate in your email communications. You weren’t amused by this last-minute meeting, on top of everything else, and your supervisor could obviously tell something was up. After the meeting your supervisor pulls you aside. "Great. Another meeting" you think to yourself.

“Listen, I’ve got about 90 emails left to send and I’ve gotta get home tonight” you start in. “Okay, then just five minutes of your time?” Your supervisor asks. “Well” you chuckle. “You just took five hours of it during that meeting, so what’s another five minutes?” Your supervisor looks down and shakes his head. He lets you know that if you can’t hit your deadlines this next week, you’ll be written up. You pull open the company’s project management platform on your laptop, showing your supervisor the impossible workload that you have. But, your supervisor doesn’t seem convinced that you’re as busy as you say. “It’s just one of those days” you tell yourself.

After a couple of weeks, you’ve worked more overtime than you can keep track of. You appeal to your supervisor and HR, asking for a new employee, pointing out that your supervisor never addressed the time constraints you’d pointed out in the first place. Your supervisor, feeling “thrown under the bus,” claims to HR that: “even an intern could hit all these deadlines.” Your supervisor gets approval to hire an intern, in fact, but instead of assigning them to you, the supervisor assigns them to “keep tabs” on you. “You’ve already got too much on your plate” your supervisor explains, “and I don’t want you training a new employee while you’re feeling so overwhelmed.” You sigh. “What does that mean?” you ask. Your supervisor places his hands together and explains: “Our new intern will report directly to me, and take notes for me throughout the day concerning ways we can improve our processes.”

After the intern has settled in for a couple of weeks, a competitive colleague from another department begins chatting with them. They spend hours together in the breakroom. You eavesdrop one evening and hear them discussing your role, how it could be outsourced to freelancers and managed remotely. They even mention how your supervisor supports the idea of dissolving your position. Furious, you begin recording the conversation. You fire off an email to your supervisor and to HR letting them know you need to talk about your role. You let them know you’re overworked and that you’re worried about this inexperienced intern ruining your department. Your supervisor claims that you “misheard” whatever it was they were talking about, so you play your recording. “People have to cover all their bases these days, don’t they” you think to yourself as you press play on your phone’s recorder app. Once the recording ends, there is silence. “This is just the win I needed” you think. But, to your chagrin, both HR and your manager aren’t interested one bit in the contents of your recording. They’re, in fact, distrubed that you are recording office conversations in the first place, stating that your “lack of trust is implacable.” To make matters worse, the HR team asks you to leave, while they discuss your future at the company with your supervisor. “How did things get this bad?” you wonder. You're a good employee, you do good work, and yet nothing is working for you.

Grateful Approach:

You wake up feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep. You sip your favorite tea as you drive to work. You get a flat tire on your way to the office, but that’s okay, because you ran into an old college roommate at the tire shop. You had a pleasant chat with them and it turns out they manage the small tire shop. After further discussion, they express interest in becoming a client of yours. What seemed like a flat tire was actually an opportunity for commission! You make it into the office. You have a million emails to answer and a large meeting. You answer as many emails as you can, but you’re happy for the meeting, as it gives you an “out” from providing an in-depth response to less important emails. You’ve had too much on your plate this week anyway, and it was only a matter of time before deadlines fell past due. You grab your supervisor after the meeting. You thank them for always making time for you and explain that you’re running out of the bandwidth you need to complete all your tasks. You ask them for advice. “I know we’re short-staffed,” Your supervisor says, “so I’ll look at hiring some help for you here shortly. In the meantime, just do whatever you can.”

Within a couple of weeks, you find yourself training an intern, which is good because you need time to follow up with your friend from the tire shop. It turns out that friend isn’t even interested in your business anymore, but he has connections who might be. Within a month, you close two new deals. A competitive colleague sees your success and begins questioning your efforts, even going so far as to submit complaints to HR about your “lack of focus,” citing that you’ve pushed all your daily tasks to your new intern and are going on more “road trips” than ever before. He wouldn’t have any way of knowing that your “road trips” constitute sales meetings, so you don’t blame him for being concerned. You’re always grateful for an opportunity to reevaluate your process, so you invite your colleague and an HR manager to a formal evaluation meeting where you take an in-depth look at your processes. You start by asking the complainant about their day-to-day rituals, saying you “hope to emulate their strengths.” This catches the colleague off guard, and they don’t know how to respond, so you start throwing scenarios at the colleague, asking them how they’d handle specific situations that you deal with on a daily basis. They don’t have responses to that either, so they quickly agree with any conclusions you provide. You conclude that you’re still doing too much work and could still use another intern. HR takes note that you’ll need additional support.

Within six months, you’ve onboard two new employees, and notice that competitive colleague of yours showing you a reverenced level of respect. This has been a good job, even an easy job in terms of career advancement. All you’ve had to do is stay positive and the pieces all seemed to fall into place. Success!

Conclusion:

When failure comes, it is all too easy to get in our heads. We must value our circumstances, even our negative ones, and learn from them in order to maximize our potential for opportunity. Success is achieved by those who reap opportunity, opportunity is presented to those who notice it, and those who recognize opportunity are typically grateful. The truly grateful among us, are those capable of intuitively divining goodness and worth from just about anything. When it comes to success, the ability to find value (gratitude), can exponentiate our prospects for achievement. Be grateful to be successful.