They are free!

# Chapter 107

Gratitude is free. Thankfulness and appreciation and recognition are all free. These well may be the most critical pieces of your life or business or progress and they are FFFFRRREEEE! Free in the sense that they carry no monetary obligation with them. They do however, have a number of requirements that they demand. The biggest one is that you change your whole posture toward the whole world and stop being a self-absorbed human being - this is why they are so valuable, they are so rare in our self-absorbed world.

I have had to legislate gratitude and thankfulness in myself and in our family, because we are so blessed and overwhelmed with people’s goodness, that it can quickly become the normative experience, and then it becomes expected, and when expectations are involved, entitlement is just a whisper away. You say, well I am not overwhelmed with people’s goodness, and then you wonder what I did to have such a perspective, who I bribed, who is laundering money through me, or what is the catch, and don’t tell me you didn’t think something along those lines - I have had this conversation too many times with too many people. This is why I said early on, that the Biggest change would be a whole posture change toward the whole world.

If I only had the time to tell you about the life: of an orphan in Ukraine, of a Burmese refugee in Thailand, of a slave miner in DRC, of a trafficked child in Cambodia, of an outcaste teenager in India, of a Muslim woman under the Taliban, and there are so many other stories to tell. This is not simply an exercise in comparative situations, but it could be a start for you, if you are struggling with being unabashedly grateful for this one wild beautiful life you have been given.