Jeremy Adam Smith:
So when we call gratitude a mental tool, what we’re doing is identifying its function as a way to correct for negativity bias. It’s a way of taking the spotlight of your attention and consciously turning that spotlight from the threats to the good things in our lives, and there are always good things.

Joel Miller:
That’s Jeremy Adam Smith. He’s the editor of Greater Good Magazine, which is produced by the Greater Good Science Center out of UC, Berkeley. He’s also the co-editor of The Gratitude Project, which is a book that collects a lot of stories and insights from the research conducted at the Greater Good Science Center.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
There’s always something good you can find in the course of a normal human life, even if it’s just family, even if it’s this cup of coffee, even if it’s feeling warm at that moment, there’s always something you can feel grateful for, even in the midst of terrible situations.

Joel Miller:
Now, before we go any further, let’s just address the question of gratitude. Why are we talking about this?
We recently did a show on the gratitude advantage and the gratitude advantage at work. In fact, we actually use some of the research written about by Jeremy Adam Smith in that conversation. But I wanted to come back to it because gratitude is a well from which we can draw resourcefulness as we pursue our goals. Stepping into the new year means deciding what to do with the next 12 months in front of us. It means choosing what to do with the time that we’re allotted, and there can be some challenges in that. The first thing is where do you start? There’s so many things we could be doing in the new year, how do we even decide what we want to do? And then beyond that, as we are settling into the goals we’ve decided on, how do we stay the course? How do we operate from a place of abundance throughout the year so that we actually can achieve those goals?
Hi, I’m Joel Miller. I’m the Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus, and in today’s episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast, I want to pull these two threads together in such a way that we can see how to get clear on what we want and how to step forward into the future. We’re going to do that first in a conversation I had with our C E O Megan Hyatt Miller about the power of lists. Lists are a really simple thing, and yet they have so many applications, including helping us decide what we want. After that, we’re going to return to the conversation with Jeremy Adam Smith and talk more broadly about gratitude, goal achievement and how gratitude can help us not only overcome negativity bias but also access other pro-social emotions and behaviors, the kind of stuff that makes life worth living.
A list is a simple thing, but it’s a really powerful thing. I shared some ideas about lists with our business accelerator clients in one of our weekly calls, and I was impressed to see just how responsive the group was to this simple idea. It turns out that a list can help open up so much possibility in terms of how we approach a problem. I don’t know how we get by without them. In fact, I think the truth is if you sit down and think about how you use lists, you don’t get by without them. You’re using them all the time. So as long as it’s true that we’re using them all the time, we might as well get clear about what they’re helping us do, and that’s what we’ll do in this conversation with Megan.
So you’ve got a lot to do. You’ve got a million things coming at you. You’ve got problems that need to be solved, but you don’t even know where to begin. You have work that needs to be done, but you’re not exactly even sure what to start on first. And Megan, do you know what that has to do with St. Augustine?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Wow. I really don’t. I’m so excited to learn though.

Joel Miller:
I’m going to tell you right now. Augustine, he was a bishop of Hippo like 1,600 years ago. Augustine had a really interesting insight while he was explaining the Book of Genesis, whatever you think about his view on the Book of Genesis, that’s not a big deal. But what he said was this, that God created everything instantaneously, but the scripture gives it to us one day at a time so we can understand it. And it’s a really interesting way of getting your head around something that is complicated in life, which is that there is way more reality than we can take in at once. And so we need to break it down. And this happens everywhere you look. This happens in your personal life, it happens in your professional life. Whatever you’re looking at, there’s more to it than you can ever see or know or comprehend or deal with. And so one of the most effective ways of getting into a situation is just to start making a list.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love that. I love lists. Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve loved lists. In fact, I learned when I was a kid that if you add stuff that you’ve already done to the list, you get to check it off right away, which is very exciting. Joel, I just remembered my favorite list story of all time.

Joel Miller:
Okay, I got to hear it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
This is guys, when you hear this story, you’re going to be like, I am here for this episode. This is going to change my life. The most important list that I ever made was after I called off my engagement, not to Joel, somebody else. And as I was thinking about who I might actually want to be with after realizing it was not the person that I’d previously been engaged to, I made a list of 100 things that I wanted in a future husband. And I read this article in an Oprah magazine about somebody who had done that and they found their spouse. I don’t even remember the details of it, but I went to a hotel, I stayed overnight. I got my yellow legal pad, and I wrote down 100 things. Now, here’s what’s amazing. Joel checked every single one of those 100 boxes, except for maybe one or two. I think I had, wears cowboy boots and tall or something about hair in there. And Joel’s not tall and he doesn’t have hair.

Joel Miller:
Yeah, there was something in there about great hair and yeah, that’s not a thing.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It turns out that’s a really negotiable point. However, like 97, 98 of those things were present in Joel. And if that does not convince you that a list can shape your life, I don’t know what we could tell you.

Joel Miller:
Well, first off, I love that list because I’m the beneficiary of that list in so many ways. But if you think about it, we use lists all the time. There’s grocery lists, there’s task lists, Santa keeps a list. There are ways that we organize these lists, all kinds of ways. They’re alphabetical, they’re by priority, they might be chronological, they might be just free association. You’re just doing a brain dump. You can even extend the power of these lists by making them multi-dimensional, that a table is nothing other than a compound list. That’s all a spreadsheet is, right? It’s just a list with lists alongside of other lists. And here’s the thing, this is what I hope becomes clear as we get going in this. We’re not using these enough. As often as we use them, the real truth is this. We don’t realize how powerful a simple list can be. And because we don’t realize how powerful it is, we often underutilize it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Exactly, which is why today we’re going to cover four uses for lists that are going to enable you to make better decisions and take more successful action. So I’m really excited about this. Joel, you shared some of this with our clients several weeks ago and they loved it, so I can’t wait to share it now with our podcast audience. So use number one for lists is ideation. Joel, talk to us about that.

Joel Miller:
Well, Stephen Covey told us to start with the end in mind, but what if you’re not even sure what the end is? You have to spend some time figuring out what you want. And one of the ways you do that is through something like brainstorming. That’s a phrase that gets used, maybe overused. But basically we’re talking about just capturing ideas. And this is actually basic to any kind of cognitive ideational process. The idea that you’re going to start breaking down the elements of your thought, the things that you want, the things that you hope, the things that you don’t want, the things that you hope don’t happen, whatever it is. So you could be looking at a project, what is this thing? Start with a list. Just start identifying the components of the project. It could be a book you want to write. What is that book you’re going to write? Start with a list of the ideas that you have for that. It could be really anything you’re going after. You want to begin by just getting down the big pieces.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I love this because it’s not like it has to be formal or it has to be structured. I mean, an outline obviously is going to ultimately become structured, but brainstorming starts kind of in a chaotic way. And I think that’s freeing because you’re starting with the end in mind of where you want to go, but you don’t have to start with the finished product. And so it’s really helpful as you’re trying to get the clarity you need to make better decisions and take more successful action to start with something that’s easy. And this is such a great place to start with brainstorming.

Joel Miller:
Well, one of the good things about using a list to do this process, and you could do this on a whiteboard, you could do it in doc on your computer, whatever it is, it gives you the chance to have your thoughts turn into things in front of you. And then when they turn into things in front of you on a list, objects, you can manipulate them, you can move them around, you can arrange them, you can decide that it doesn’t matter to you one or two items and delete them. You can decide that those one or two items are actually less important than other items that you hadn’t considered until you considered those. And so by objectifying your thinking, you’re able to analyze it and arrange it in a way that is really powerful. And what that means is, if you think about this, apply it to something as concrete as your list of annual goals.
When you sit down to write a list of annual goals, you’re going to identify the things that you want. And that process might take a little time. You’re going to start by creating probably a list of aspirations. And that list of aspirations, there may be things on it that you aspire to more than others. And so you’re going to prioritize those. And then you’re going to need to somehow break those aspirations down into actionable targets, actionable projects, goals. And once you do that, then you’ll be able to arrange those. You’ll be able to decide, well, I want to do this first, or I want to do this second. And so it’s by objectifying your thinking that you can actually get clarity on a goal that will enable you then ultimately to go achieve it. And so when we talk about making lists, when I’m talking about this, I’m not talking about ideation for the sake of ideation. I’m talking about ideation for the sake of action. And if you want to take action, ultimately you have to start by just getting something down.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, it’s why so often if you just get yourself with some other people in a whiteboard, you’re going to have a breakthrough. I think-

Joel Miller:
That’s really true.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
… with book projects that we’ve been working on, so that falls under your purview and how we ultimately make a decision on which ones we want to pursue, and then ultimately what’s going to be included in them. I mean, usually that begins with this use number one for lists, which is ideation and brainstorming. It ends up becoming in an outline or a book proposal, but it doesn’t start out that way. And I think this is a really non-threatening way to start with something broad that ultimately becomes actionable and specific. Okay, well that takes us to use number two for lists, which is reference. So Joel, talk about the value of reference.

Joel Miller:
Well, you have to refer to things all the time. And if you’ll notice, they’re usually lists. The reason for this is really simple, data resists memory. Once you get a certain amount of data, it’s too complicated, it’s too much, it’s too extensive. You cannot keep it in your head. And if you can’t keep it in your head, you have to put it in a place where you can access it when you need it. And so I think about things usually like workflows or a checklist. A workflow enables you to take the thing that you do or somebody else does, break it down, list it item by item, and then it enables you to go recreate those same steps at a later time. You don’t have to remember what those steps were, the list does the memory work for you.
And I guarantee you, your memory is not as good as you think. And if you already know that your memory’s not great, then it’s actually even worse. So the reality is we need things like workflows, like checklists to take the random data that a task is composed of or a project is composed of to break it down in a linear fashion so that it can be reproduced at a later time without trying to remember all the ins and outs.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, this is huge. And I think the more your business grows, the more you have on your plate, the more people you have reporting to you, the more having things in a concrete form, a list of some type will enable you to go back to those things without the burden of trying to remember them all, which I think is hugely important. And it’s a really important tool for alignment. You didn’t mention that exactly, but as your organization grows and you need everybody to do certain things in the same way or have the same understanding of something, the only way that can happen is if it’s objectified, right?

Joel Miller:
That’s right.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So it can’t be something that’s living in your head or you end up in a game of telephone. But if you can use, for example, a workflow or some kind of CRM in order to make sure everybody understands what needs to be understood about your clients or customers, then you can have alignment, which is going to drive high quality execution. So I think this use number two for lists of reference is really one that could be underestimated.

Joel Miller:
Well, there’s so many other uses for reference. You think about things like your health stats. You think about things like a menu, you think about features and benefits on a product. You think about the specs, you think about how you catalog things or inventory things. These are nothing other than lists. The table of contents in a book. Even the index in a book is nothing other than a list. And it’s when you begin to see that once you break these things down, wherever and whatever you need to track, if it’s in a list, you can refer to it whenever you need to. And that really opens up the ability to think creatively in the moment about the things you need to and save your memory for better stuff. Who needs to know that workflow if you can outsource it to a piece of paper or a file on a computer?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So I just thought of two lists in this category that are really beneficial for me. One, in the health stats, I keep a running list of all of my medications and supplements that I’m on because you know how when you go to the doctor every single time you go, you have to make that list, it’s like somebody needs to invent a universal app for this that you update one place and it updates all your providers, but it does not happen at this point. Does not exist. And so having that in a list, I can just pull it up as I’m sitting there checking in at the doctor and it saves me from going, okay, what is that? Which thing did I switch to? What’s the dosage? Super helpful.
The other thing is that I have a list of my various lunch orders from local restaurants that my executive assistant can order from and make a schedule with for each week for me. So instead of her having to say, what would you like for lunch today from such and such? She doesn’t have to ask me because I’ve already given her that information. She’s just empowered to go make it happen and make sure I have something to eat between meetings and I don’t have to think about what do I want. So in a way, this use number two for list reference is a great way to capture decisions that you’ve made that you want to continue to make so you can eliminate decision fatigue.

Joel Miller:
Another example of that very same thing, we empower our EAs with lists of all of, like an executive working with that EA, all of our likes and dislikes, all of our personal information, all of that kind of background stuff that you would spend, I don’t know, months of your life reciting to somebody on the phone over and over again in between various uses. But instead, if it all lives in one document, which is to say a bunch of lists in a document, then they can go refer to that whenever they need to book a flight, whenever they need to book a hotel, whenever they need to order lunch, whenever they need to do whatever. And by giving them that information in a list, they’re able to consult it, refer to it, and then act on it.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Absolutely. Well again, this is why at the beginning of this episode we talked about the idea that lists can help you make better decisions and take more successful action. So that leads us to use number three, evaluation. So how do we use lists for evaluation, Joel?

Joel Miller:
Well, you know that this is a thing because we all know what a top 10 list is, which is to say we all use lists to evaluate things all the time. We instantly default to prioritizing things in our life by lists, whether it’s the movies we like, the she’s my best friend, for instance. So we have a way instantly of categorizing things first, second, third, and so on. That goes everywhere. So if to organize your thinking around priorities, around prioritization, a list is the best place to start because all you have to do is get it down and then put it in order. So as you are putting it in order, you’re making these kind of evaluative judgements. Another version of that is comparison. So in a side-by-side table, you can actually then make comparisons between things that are like or unlike each other, depending on how many side-by-side comparisons you have, you could make many, many comparisons in a particular table.
And that’s really valuable while you’re making decisions, it’s really valuable while you are deciding between competing options that you may have in front of you. Another thing you can do with comparison is you talked about health tracking, tracking metrics or health data. You can see where things came from and where they’re going. That use of a list is really valuable. You’re talking about a piece of data that you might then be able to even go in and visualize through another program. It’s all that core data though, that if you’re not capturing that, you won’t get the visualization. The pie chart doesn’t make itself. So it’s the data that goes into it that enables you to make these kind of comparisons. And then there are things like tallies that are really helpful, whether it’s like vote tallying or any other kind of like so-and-so said X, so-and-so said Y.
Well, how many other people did, you need to have some tallies, that’s a list. Finally, things like timelining, if you’re looking at to evaluate for instance, something that somebody is telling you versus what another person is telling you, one of the ways you sort out the truth from falsehood is just to begin looking at like, well, when did that happen? And when you start making those kind of calls, you’re making lists. You’re basically saying, this event preceded this event which led to this event, which then led to this other event. And that enables you in that evaluative process to start doing things like determining relationships between what happened, what didn’t happen, what led to what, what caused what, and it enables you then to make a call based on what otherwise might be just a lot of random information and he said, she said.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay. So immediately I have an idea that popped into my head that I want to get your thoughts on. So we’re going to go on in just a second to use number four for lists, which is action. And the reason I’m going ahead and bringing that up is because when you were talking about use number three, evaluation and you’re talking about organizing and prioritization and all that, I immediately thought about project management. We have been for many years using Asana, at Full Focus we are getting ready to do a trial of a new platform called Click Up, but functionally they’ll do the same thing, which is break our goals down into projects and then into tasks and so forth. So what do you think that is? Do you think project management is evaluation or action or does it kind of span both of these?

Joel Miller:
Well, it does span both of them because when you objectify your thinking, as I said earlier, it enables you to make determinations about it. Well, one of the places that you’re going to have to do that in project management is determining how much jelly to stick on that biscuit. And when you have a limited amount of time and you have certain number of projects, they may not all fit. And so you’re going to have to start making calls like, well, this will come first and this will come second. And that ability to see it, which is what a great thing our project management system does, is it creates a visual representation of the work that you’re trying to do. It creates lists, and those lists then enable you to say things like, well, I can sacrifice this, I can push this out to the future. I need to have this now, this other thing now.
If you don’t have that, you can’t make those evaluations. But what’s really essential of course, is that, as you said, this leads into action. This leads into step four or use number four, rather. That’s how you’re going to go take action. You’re going to take action in that order.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And as you were talking, I was like, well, you really need this use number three evaluation if you’re going to ultimately get where most of us naturally go with list making, which is around action. And so I think if you do good evaluation, for example, in Click Up, it has this feature where you can see workload by team members. So you could determine how realistic a certain deadline was based on what else other people have on their plate. And I love that feature. I’m excited to see if it turns out to be as cool as we think it’s going to be, but that evaluation would then lead us to a place where we could take action. So let’s get into use number four action right now and what you would put into that category.

Joel Miller:
The most basic form of this everybody does all the time is their shopping list. If you’re going to go buy groceries, you’re not just going to walk into the store and just start grabbing stuff off of shelves, you’re going to have a list of some kind. Well, you might.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It doesn’t go well, especially if that place happens to be, I don’t know, Target, speaking for personal experience.

Joel Miller:
Yeah, yeah. You’re you’re going to want to have some kind of attack plan. And what’s true for groceries is true for all your work, which is to say that if you don’t have an attack plan on the day, you’re really going to struggle. You’re going to end up, if you go back to the grocery store example, you walk in there without a list, guess what you walk out with?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Ice cream.

Joel Miller:
Whatever. You walk out with whatever just happened to hit you as interesting as you were going through. The same thing will happen to your day if you’re not careful. And that’s why you have a list, you have a to-do list and that to-do list, we talk about particularly the daily big three because everybody’s to-do list is actually usually too long to accomplish in a day. Maybe it’s got 15 things, maybe 18, maybe 20, whatever it is, you’re not getting 20 things done today, but you are going to get several really important things done if you identify them in advance and that’s why we talk about the daily big three.
We also talk about the weekly big three and the quarterly big three. So the daily big three, these are the three big things that you’re going to accomplish that day. There may be other things that you’ll slide in that you’ll work on, there undoubtedly will be, but if you achieve these big three, you will have walked out of the day as success. You will have gotten exactly what you went into the grocery store to get. And that’s true for your weekly big three too. When you talk about project management, when you talk about breaking goals down into projects and tasks, you’re really then saying, okay, this week I need to get these three objectives. If I get these three objectives, then I can consider my week successful. And that’s true for quarterly also, you’re going to identify three quarterly goals that if you have them in place, you will make progress all year long on your overall list of goals.
And so at its most basic though, what’s true about every instance I just mentioned is this is a list. This is something that you have brainstormed. This is something you have used to evaluate your activity, and now it’s on a list that you’re going to go tackle. And it’s the list that actually empowers the tackling.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You know what I just thought of while you were talking, is that a list is a powerful way to create focus because by virtue of the fact that you’re putting things on the list, whether you’re typing it or you’re handwriting it on a post-it note, you’re excluding all kinds of other things. You’re inherently focusing and prioritizing just with the act of making the list. And so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about overwhelm. I’ve been talking with our clients about overwhelm, and I think that one of the great things about using lists in this way to help you make better decisions and take more powerful actions is that it really is a tool for focus. Because part of what happens in overwhelm is you just have all this stuff kind of swirling around and everything feels as important as everything else, and it’s hard to kind of discriminate and say, but these are the things I’m going to do now, or these are the things that are most important now.
And when you go through this process, the end of this use number four, action, once you finally have it dialed into a list, as much as you’re saying what you will do, you’re also saying what you’re not going to do. The same, I mean the shopping list, is that, right? When I make my grocery list every week, I’m saying no to like 95% of the stuff in the store and I’m saying yes to a very small subset that matches my budgetary constraints, the menu for the week, our dietary concerns, all that stuff. And it helps to simplify my life. So I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it that way, but since we’re all about focus here at Full Focus and Business Accelerator, I think this is a powerful and underestimated tool for focus.
Joel, before we wrap up this conversation, I just thought of a question that I don’t know the answer to with you, which is, what is your favorite use for a list?

Joel Miller:
I have many favorite uses for lists. Everyone that I mentioned here, I use them every day and every one of these four things. But one that I think is particularly powerful for business owners is the freedom compass that we teach. Now you hear compass, that doesn’t sound like a list, it starts as a list. We use a task filter to enable a business owner, and we do this with ourselves at least once a year, often more than that, to basically identify everything your time is going to. You want to look at things like the activities that you’re pursuing, the tasks, you want to look at the meetings that you’re in. And as you’re putting these down in lists, you start identifying things like the larger buckets into which they might fit. So back to the uses that we’ve already talked about, ideation, that is a case where you are using this list to help you conceptualize your work.
You’re also then using it to evaluate because as you’re putting things into the list, these larger organizational buckets, you’re starting to make evaluations. You’re starting to say, I really feel very proficient about this particular kind of activity, especially given various circumstances. About this other kind of activity, I don’t feel all that proficient. In fact, maybe my proficiency is really low in that one, whereas with another one, my proficiency is high in, man, my passion is really high too. And so what we do using those criteria of passion and proficiency, you can judge, evaluate every one of the tasks, activities that is in your task filter. And if you do that, what you can do then is actually chart it over to the freedom compass, which will basically give you kind of your ideal job description.
It’s going to give you the job description that uses the best of you to create the best impact in your business. And that’s amazing because you could talk about somebody going from getting a daily contribution where their value is say 50% of what their potential is and bump it all the way up to like 80%, and all they had to do was sit down and start with a list.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and that’s the power of lists. That’s why this has been such a great conversation today because we’ve talked about four uses for lists that are going to enable you to make better decisions and take more successful action. Joel, I totally agree. The freedom compass is maybe the pinnacle of how you can do that in a professional context. It’s why we go so deep into this with our clients in our coaching program business accelerator. So just a review, the four uses for lists are use number one, ideation, use number two, reference, use number three, evaluation and use number four, action.

Joel Miller:
One particular kind of list that can be helpful in achieving our goals is a gratitude list. Just marking down the things for which we’re grateful can empower us as we step forward to achieve our goals. I wanted to talk more broadly about gratitude with Jeremy Adam Smith, and we’ll do that right after the break.
We started this episode with a clip from Jeremy Adam Smith. Again, he’s the editor of the Greater Good magazine and also the co-editor of the book, the Gratitude Project. The Gratitude Project is honestly a comprehensive look at the way thankfulness shows up throughout our lives, how it empowers positive action, how it creates resourcefulness in us, how it can affect us in work, home, marriage, honestly everywhere. And I thought, who better to talk to about gratitude and the empowering nature of it as we step out to achieve our goals, then Jeremy Adam Smith. So I asked him to come on the show. He did. This is what we talked about. Before we get going, let me just say that we had some audio issues with the Jeremy Adam Smith interview. It can be annoying in a few places, but stick with it because this interview is really impactful. Jeremy, tell us about the Greater Good Science Center and the study of gratitude that you guys are doing there.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
So we do two things. We sponsor research into what are called pro-social emotions and behaviors. So this is all the good stuff, compassion, empathy, gratitude, stuff like that. And more recently we focused a lot on bridging differences. Americans are feeling very strongly divided from each other these days, and we’ve been looking a lot at the science of how people who are different from each other can get along, and gratitude is definitely part of that picture. The second thing we do is we popularize this research. We try to get it out to groups of people who can use it, mostly on their jobs. We have programs especially aimed at teachers and healthcare workers and folks like that. Sometimes we describe ourselves as being a kind of transmission belt between the academy and the rest of the world.
The Gratitude Project was started 10 years ago, I was startled to realize this morning by a grant called from the John Templeton Foundation, and it was a large grant, we had never seen so much money. And we were supposed to do the two things, the two things that we do, which is sponsor research, which we did. We spent millions of dollars sponsoring research into the science of gratitude, and we also published many, many, many articles on that science and also looking at real world applications. And a lot of that was distilled into collection of essays. The best of the pieces we published were distilled into a collection of essays called the Gratitude Project that was published in 2020.

Joel Miller:
You and your colleague Robert Emmons refer to gratitude as a mental tool. What do you mean by that?

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Okay, so humans, and you will not be surprised to hear this, have a hardwired tendency towards something called negativity bias. Negativity bias, it’s a tool for helping us survive. We see threats everywhere. Our brains are designed to see threats, and you can understand why evolution might have given us this, it’s because threats can threaten our existence. A lot of the threats that we face these days are not as direct as, say, being attacked by a lion jumping out of a bush or something like that. But they can come in the form of not getting a raise or a potential layoff or et cetera, et cetera. These are the kinds of modern threats we face, and our brains are constantly looking out for those and constantly looking out for flaws in our fellow human beings.
So when we call gratitude a mental tool, what we’re doing is identifying its function as a way to correct for negativity bias. It’s a way of taking the spotlight of your attention and consciously turning that spotlight from the threats to the good things in our lives. And there are always good things. There’s always something good you can find in the course of a normal human life, even if it’s just family, even if it’s this cup of coffee, even if it’s feeling warm at that moment, there’s always something you can feel grateful for, even in the midst of terrible situations.

Joel Miller:
In response to that, I think about the effect that that would have on us, the advantage that would give us as we pursue goals, if we’re just inclined to see things with this negativity bias that would put us in a place potentially of almost an inability to respond to certain advantage or opportunities in our environment. And yet gratitude then can reposition us, can put us in a different kind of mindset, one where we might be able to act out of a different framework to come at those opportunities, maybe more advantageously.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
There’s a researcher named David DeSteno who has done a whole series of studies on gratitude and goals, gratitude goals and perseverance. And the work to me is really interesting. I mean, I’ll summarize by saying he just finds a very strong link. People who are more predisposed to be grateful, people who are induced to be grateful. All of those people over both the short run and the long run show a better ability to focus on their goals and persevere and pursue to them. Why this is, what the underlying mechanism is, I think is still very debatable. I can pull science from other areas and say for example, that neuroscience studies find that gratitude is associated with greater activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is a part of our brain that is associated with learning, with executive function, with impulse control.
And so obviously there’s some kind of relationship there, but to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t really exactly been worked out. But what we do know is that yes, gratitude helps with the pursuit of goals and it helps with self-discipline, it helps our ability to think over the long term. And why that is exactly, maybe it has something to do with the expansion of our consciousness, the ability to focus on those good things, both now, what’s immediately in front of us, and also what could potentially be good in the future.

Joel Miller:
When I think about gratitude and the connection to goal setting, you can imagine the counter story, which is if you’re feeling grateful, you’re possibly therefore content and you don’t need to strive for something. And yet that seems to be exactly the opposite of what DeSantos research shows us.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Yeah, I think this is a very interesting thing. I mean, I think a lot of people fear within themselves. For those of us who are American, especially those of us who were like Gen Xers or baby boomers, we were really raised with this ethic of constantly feeling restless, constantly striving for excellence. And I think that there was a kind of anti-gratitude attitude that we were raised with where the feeling was, if you appreciate what you have too much, then you won’t be too content that you won’t strive for that excellence, that you won’t strive to be to better yourself. I think right now there’s a big culture change going on with Gen Z. You see this popping up in a lot of research, millennials and Gen Z, and that’s really interesting. But there’s still large groups of people who just kind of feel like, if I’m too grateful for what I have, I won’t strive for more.
And in fact, maybe counterintuitively for some the research just doesn’t find that. It just doesn’t find that association. In fact, as we were just discussing, it finds kind of the opposite, that an attitude of gratitude seems to result in more expansive, future-oriented thinking. I suppose in a way that’s a bit of a paradox. I mean, it’s almost a kind of superstitious way of thinking, right? It’s like, oh, if I stop and I give thanks for my nice house, I won’t want a bigger and better house. But we kind of know that’s not true. I mean, you don’t even need a scientific study to tell you that. It’s just that you might pursue that bigger and better house in a more calmer, more balanced manner because that’s what gratitude does for you. And it brings balanced to your life. It helps you see, it doesn’t take away the bad things. It doesn’t prevent you from seeing them, ideally, it doesn’t prevent you from seeing them, but it does help you to see the good things, and it does help you to conceive of good things that could happen in the future.

Joel Miller:
So we can see gratitude then as almost like an emotional foundation, a solid emotional foundation for goal pursuit?

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. One of them. I mean, there’s other components here and it’s interesting how the science of gratitude intersects with other kinds of research. For example, there’s a lot of really fascinating research into purpose, sense of purpose and meaning. And I think that this is really important when you’re talking about work and jobs. I think that, again, just thinking about American culture, there is an attitude that your thank you at work is your paycheck, and that’s why you don’t need thanks at work. And in fact, the surveys and a lot of studies show that Americans are least likely to express gratitude on the job or to hear thank you on the job than any other domain in life. And the problem with this way of thinking is that we don’t just work for money, we also work for a sense that we matter, we work for because we want to feel like we’re contributing to the world in some meaningful way.
And for some jobs, that’s easy. If you’re the host of a podcast or you edit an online magazine, it’s fairly easy to see how that might be purposeful, meaningful work, in other kinds of jobs it’s a lot more difficult. And I think when people really hate their jobs, they’re often suffering from a crisis of purpose and meaning. And the research shows, and I think your common sense will show this as well, that oftentimes that crisis of purpose is also associated with the crisis of gratitude. If we’re going to our jobs, we feel like they’re meaningless, we’re not going to be inclined to feel grateful. And sometimes you get, and you got to listen to that. You got to listen to that. If you’re really struggling with a crisis of meaning at your job, it might be time to try to change jobs, it might be time to advocate for some sort of change on the job.
But these things are very closely associated, the sense of gratitude, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, and also a sense of empathy and compassion. All of these things are associated with each other. There’s a kind of virtuous circle, more grateful workplaces are more purposeful workplaces, which are more empathic workplaces where people care about each other more and are more willing to help each other out.

Joel Miller:
Let’s talk for a moment about what gratitude is and isn’t. I wonder if you could just give us a quick summation of what it is, but then I want to shift to what it isn’t, because there are a couple of things that we might default to thinking that it’s simply not.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
The most meaningful kind of gratitude, and I’m drawing on research here, is when we say aloud, we’re not just thinking it, you got to say it aloud or write it down, thank you to a person who has brought something good into our life. That can be to a barista for the cup of coffee they just handed you, it can be to your spouse for all the support that they’ve given you over the years. There’s many, many ways of expressing that gratitude. There’s also a more abstract kind of gratitude where we say thank you for things, for beautiful weather, for my beautiful home, my beautiful arts and crafts home in the Bay Area. There’s a spiritual element to gratitude, which Robert Emmons explores quite a lot.
That’s a little more difficult to quantify. The fun part about gratitude between humans is that you can ask a lot of questions about the relationship and you can ask the person who received the gratitude about how it made them feel. But you can’t do that with blue skies or good weather or anything like that. The gratitude is completely one way and you can’t really study what nature thinks of your gratefulness towards it. That’s the essence of gratitude, is just being able to say to yourself, wow, there’s something good happening right now and then to express it aloud.

Joel Miller:
Now then, contrary to that, it’s not as you point out, a naive form of positive thinking or a zero sum game. Tell us a little bit about those disclaimers.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Right. Well, so this is another thing that I think a lot of Americans were raised with, which is the idea that if you’re consciously trying to practice gratitude, then you must be putting on rose colored glasses, that it must somehow obliterate the bad things. And I’m not going to say that that can’t happen. I mean, I think we all know people who focus just a little bit too much on the positive and it can start to become rather annoying. However, in real life, most people understand perfectly well that the threats have not gone away. That there are things that they have to deal with in life. And some of those things are really hard. And in more extreme situations, situations of violence or dealing with addiction or serious mental illness, that can start to feel really all consuming and gratitude can even start to feel like an extremely inappropriate response.
However, in the course of normal life, that’s mostly just not the case. I mean, I think most people understand, people understand that there’s bad and good in life, and they understand that sometimes, especially if we’re having a hard time, it can be really hard to see the good. And that’s when you need to hit the conscious override. Your unconscious mind is always going to take the shortest path. That’s what the unconscious mind does. That’s why we have things like racism. Racism is the unconscious mind taking the shortest path towards understanding people. And you can say something similar about seeing the good things in life. Sometimes the pathway towards seeing those good things is going to be a little longer, and that’s when you need to make the effort.

Joel Miller:
Speaking of making the effort, in the Gratitude Project, you talk about six tactics. These would be things that would get your conscious mind going here. Let’s just discuss a few of those. The first is mention the pancakes. What do you mean by that?

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Well, so I’m mainly a writer and editor, and I draw inspiration from that for this, which is that gratitude works best when it’s specific, just like in good writing. In good writing, it helps a lot to be very specific about what you’re talking about. If you’re describing something or if you’re trying to describe an idea, it’s more powerful when you can be more specific. So if you say to a person, oh, I’m just so grateful for who you are, well that’s great, and in context that can be powerful. But in general, it’s going to be so much more powerful if you say to them, I’m so grateful for how you bring humor to every difficult situation that we face. It really bolsters my resilience and helps me to get through them. And I’m just so grateful to you for being there for me in that way.
That is just a much more powerful way of expressing gratitude. And in a work context. I think vagueness can really feel disingenuous when you’re on the job. I really want to thank Jane for being a great worker. Jane doesn’t care, but you can show Jane that you mean it by saying, “Jane, the way you came through last week in producing that podcast and getting it out there when so many things had gone wrong, that was terrific and amazing and I hope that doesn’t happen too often, but I really appreciate it that you came through.” That’s meaningful.

Joel Miller:
What about fake outside the box?

Jeremy Adam Smith:
So I call this varsity level gratitude. So I talked about negativity bias, the hardwired tendency to focus on threats and the bad things in life. There’s also a psychological tendency called hedonic adaptation. And this is quite simply our tendency to get used to things both bad and good. And I think that there’s a creative, it sort of higher levels of gratitude. There’s a creative element where you sort of try to force yourself to see the things that you may have gotten completely used to. And this is a very, very cognitive process. A lot of gratitude is just very heartfelt. It’s visceral, it’s effective, meaning that it involves feelings, oftentimes it’s very spontaneous. But what I’m talking about here is the kind of gratitude where you kind of think yourself through it. And this is most helpful in situations that are difficult, if we get fired from our job.
Now, there’s probably not a lot to be grateful for in connection with that kind of experience. But over time, if you think about it, oftentimes there is something to feel grateful for. Many years ago now, or much earlier in my career, I was forced out of a job and at the time it just seemed completely tragic. I was a new parent and I was like, how am I going to support my family? And ultimately, looking back, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me because it kicked me off a path that just wasn’t working for me and put me on a new one. It doesn’t always work out that well for everybody, but it worked out, I see in retrospect, well, for me, and I’m very grateful for that, and it was a kind of opportunity.
Losing a job is not always an opportunity, but sometimes it is. And that’s what I mean by think outside of the box. It’s easy to feel grateful in the midst of the good things, it’s harder to feel grateful in the midst of the things. And sometimes that involves a little creativity and a little more thinking than maybe we’re used to in the context of gratitude.

Joel Miller:
What about once in a while, think about death and loss? That’s pretty heavy.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
So this is linked to some very specific gratitude activities that we profile in the book, but also on our website, ggia.berkeley.edu. We call this exercise mental subtraction of people or events. So one way to stimulate gratitude is to imagine a particular person not being in your life. Now, sometimes you can imagine this and you can say, oh yeah, I got to get that person out of my life. I mean, I really want to emphasize the bad things exist. Relationships can be unhealthy, situations can be very unhealthy, and you might need to actually leave them. However, you may also find that engaging in this mental subtraction exercise, subtracting the job, subtracting a particular coworker, subtracting a family member from your life and imagining your life without them actually will stimulate gratitude because you’ll start to realize, if you really think about it, how much they bring into your life.
I actually, I know that you guys are business accelerator and we’re mostly talking about work, but I actually think this is super helpful in marriages because it’s so hard. I mean, if you’ve been married for decades, and maybe this is true if you’ve been on a job for decades too, it is so easy to get caught up in that day-to-day grind and to feel that sense of dissatisfaction with the many, many, many little annoyances that always plague us in daily life. And I think this exercise can be especially valuable for helping us take the longer view. It’s like, wow, if I wasn’t married to so-and-so, to your spouse, I wouldn’t have the income on my own to afford this beautiful home that we live in.
If I didn’t have this job, I wouldn’t have had that opportunity to travel so much before the pandemic. And then during the pandemic, unlike a lot of people, I didn’t lose my job. I was allowed to work from home. And even though my job is really annoying this week, and I kind of hate all my coworkers, I know that at the end of the day, thanks to gratitude, that it has brought a lot of good things in my life. And being able to do that helps you sort of balance out I think a little bit.

Joel Miller:
That reminds me of Timothy Wilson’s book, Redirect. He talks there about the George Bailey technique, which is pretty close to what you’re describing. That idea that you, by imagining the situation with that element removed, you suddenly then have gratitude stoked for that thing.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
Right. George Bailey is from, It’s a Wonderful Life, yeah?

Joel Miller:
Yeah.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
That movie is kind of a wonderful exercise in mental subtraction.

Joel Miller:
And seasonally appropriate.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
And seasonally appropriate.

Joel Miller:
We’ve talked here and there in this conversation so far about work contexts and what it looks like to have gratitude on the job or what it looks like without it. What can business leaders do to generate more gratitude within their teams?

Jeremy Adam Smith:
So the first and most important thing is to just be grateful themselves, to model it. There haven’t been a lot of studies on this, but the studies that have been done show that it really needs to start at the top. And oftentimes, I think it helps a lot to foster an attitude of gratitude in an organization for the people at the top to thank the people at the “bottom”, to make visible the contributions of some of the most invisible people within an organization. The people who I think of as being the quarterbacks in a given organization in a university context is the faculty, at hospitals it’s doctors. If you’re unlucky enough to work at Twitter right now, it’s Elon Musk. There’s always going to be the people who are just in the spotlight within an organization. But it helps a lot to shine that spotlight on people who never get that.
People like the editor of this podcast, who the hell hears about the editor of the podcast? But that’s an absolutely essential function. So that’s one way to do it. Start at the top. Have the people at the top, thank the people at the bottom, make that work visible. The other thing that I think is super important to say about this is that it must not be obligatory. It must not be. You cannot create situations where people are being forced to be grateful, especially in a work context. Child rearing, it’s different. You force your kids to be grateful so that they can grow into gratitude. But employees are not children and you can’t treat them like that, otherwise they’re not going to like you very much. And that is what it will recall for a lot of employees. They’re going to be made to feel like little kids and they want to rebel. So that situation is to be avoided at all costs.

Joel Miller:
Jeremy Adam Smith, thank you so much for being on podcast.

Jeremy Adam Smith:
All right, thank you so much.

Joel Miller:
So lists and gratitude. If we were to stitch these two ideas together, here’s what we get. A list enables us to identify what we want. It enables us to keep it front of mind throughout the year, keep it visible. It enables us to really evaluate the things that are getting in our way, or maybe opportunities that might in fact actually be distractions. A list is going to enable us to get focused and stay focused, and that’s essential for action. That’s essential for going forth and doing the thing that we’ve identified that we’re going to do, pursuing the goal. But how about staying the course? That’s where gratitude comes in. Gratitude is the kind of pro-social emotion that enables us to stay the course as we go to pursue our goals. It helps keep our mindset in a state of abundance and possibility while also persevering through those difficult stretches and goal achievement.
You know what is often called the messy middle, we all face it, it’s why New Year’s resolutions so often fail. Once a person gets past week two, week three, week four, obstacles set in that really challenge the whole prospect of completing this resolution of going forward and finishing. Gratitude can help keep us grounded in that place. And as Jeremy mentioned, the mechanism that drives that is not exactly clear. It doesn’t have to be clear in order to take advantage of it. I mean, most of us couldn’t explain the way an internal combustion engine worked, but that doesn’t keep us from driving. The truth is, if we know that expressing gratitude helps us achieve our goals, what are we waiting for?
It’s time to engender more of that in ourselves, especially as business owners we’re thinking about modeling that for our teams because we don’t get to achieve our goals unless they’re achieving their goals with us, unless we’re achieving goals together. As organizations, our goals are bigger than us, and that means we need an entire organization expressing gratitude and moving that direction. I think the help that Jeremy has given us here is showing how that works and connecting those dots for us.
And that’s it for this episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. Before I get to my usual close, I just want to say, hey, a big thanks to Jeremy Adam Smith for being here today. Again, I want to plug his book, the Gratitude Project. It’s a great comprehensive guide to gratitude and what it means for our life, highly recommend it. I also want to take a second to thank Nick Jaworski, our producer, Nick’s been slugging along, creating this show for years now, and we sound great because Nick is great. That’s the truth.

Nick Jaworski:
Aw, thanks Joel.

Joel Miller:
You’re welcome, Nick. And I also want to thank you, the listeners for listening, for streaming, for just being here. Honestly, sharing these conversations is incredibly gratifying for us, and I’m grateful for you. If you’re a business owner and you’re interested in learning more about our business accelerator coaching program, go to businessaccelerator.com. We help successful but overwhelmed small business owners just like you, scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. And if you’d like to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com. You’ll be grateful that you did. That’s it. We’ll be back next week with more conversations to help accelerate your business.