Episode 7: The Appreciation Effect
Synopsis
This episode is about gratitude, appreciation, causality, and choosing our success instead of seeking it. "Happiness when" is a recipe for dissatisfaction; Mandy breaks down how appreciation can provide an equation for success that is sustainable over the longterm.
Show Notes
Welcome back journeyer - I’m so glad you’re here today. I am almost jumping out of my skin with excitement about what I get to share today. This episode will be about gratitude, causality, choosing our success.
Yesterday I woke up anticipating an amazing week, and the first thing that happened when I opened my phone was I received a connection request through LinkedIn. I seeing the notification that someone wants to connect with me is always exciting, and it lifted my mood which was already great. She and I had 4 connections in common, she wrote a very thoughtful message to me, and something about her profile resonated.
I accepted, and jotted a quick message back with my thumbs, eager to continue the conversation.
Just as I hit the little paper airplane icon to send the message into the ethers to her, something about what I had just done and the eager feeling I felt caught my attention.
It reminded me a little of wanting to heap more of the stuffing onto my plate before I’d finished my mashed potatoes and turkey at Thanksgiving two weeks ago.
My attention shifted for a moment to the other 1200 contacts I have on LinkedIn. The other 1200 people who have been in my network for 10, 20, even 30 years in some cases offline, but whom I hadn’t nurtured or inquired after recently.
I learned a new type of gratitude.
I thought, maybe gratitude isn’t always amplifying existing gratitude for something, or turning gratitude on when it’s off, but maybe it’s like hunting for easter eggs in my own back yard: finding an opportunity to appreciate what is already filling my plate when I get offered the next course.
Let’s talk about the effect of this realization. My reaction to this new awareness.
Can you imagine what you would have felt if you were me, making that exact realization?
Remember theres a difference between what you might think… and what you feel. Go ahead, give it a try. I’ll give you a sec.
Noticing how hmmmm… I’m so eager for what is new. Yet there’s so much in front of me that’s in some ways, neglected.
I’m happy to tell you what it felt like for me: Gratitude for my existing connections didn’t lessen my feelings of excitement about my new connection, but to say it didn’t change them would not be accurate. It strengthened my position when it comes time to build a new connection. Here’s how:
The excitement to meet this new person moving forward remained, but I couldn’t avoid feeling the sting of recognizing how I had forgotten or overlooked the value of existing relationships in my life, and simultaneously I felt pride, satisfaction, and possibility about all the gems that are already in my life, just waiting to be picked back up.
Also, I was now thinking about the opportunity of meeting someone new in proper perspective. The possibility got appropriately rescaled . it was in better proportion to reality within my life.
That set me up for a healthier expectation around the new connection, and also reseats me in the security of the network that already has my back.
With my awareness, I could now see 2 future paths playing out for this new connection – equally probable:
One where, like history repeating itself, like a pair of new shoes that gets worn once and then cast into the back of the closet and forgotten, this connection could be underappreciated. Counted, but not developed. Potential unrealized.
Or another, created when I choose another way of being, and of appreciating what is already mine. A path where I cultivate the relationship from a grounded place of gratitude – for myself and for the other.
This whole conversation parallels another realization I made about two weeks ago and that I’ve been actively contemplating ever since.
How do we judge a successful life? The templates most modern people have seen and tried on include leaving the table with more chips than we bought in for. Exiting the poker game after we’re ahead. I noticed this. Even in me I noticed it, that’s how I came to this realization. There’s a scraping, pushing, pressure of scarcity all imbuing that measure of success.
I’ll share a hypothetical example. Someone follows a traditional path, begins life in a working lower middle class family. Goes to college – or doesn’t. Feels pressure to choose a job that pays well enough to create a life they can be “proud of”. Gets a little altitude climbing a ladder in corporate, or piecing jobs together in a respected industry, makes moves as needed to keep moving “forward” – as defined by earning an income that affords them to just, get that house, buy some land, support their family, but more than that, save money year after year so they can retire one day. Happiness always out in the future, and attached to material outcomes. Dependence on the material. Fueling someone else’s dreams while we make the “necessary concessions” to plan for a someday that might never come. Quite literally.
I know it’s something you’ve thought of before. People acknowledge it, but let’s actually break it down.
How we spend money IS our values.
Happiness through x, y, or z isn’t actually real.
We assign the causality – often unconsciously. The thin string tying “if this then that” together is delicate, and if not created subconsciously, then by our limited but worshiped conscious reasoning.
If this feels familiar or you see someone you love doing this:
True or false: they already have enough things to be happy. Your problem is that you feel you can’t enjoy them for one of a handful of reasons. Anxiousness, depression, numbing behaviors, fear, or poor self confidence.
And there’s probably some way that you’re blaming yourself for that. Which isn’t helping, but is in its own way a type of life preserver, in that it’s the most obvious way of keeping our heads above water. This self blame is acting as your tethering to “reality” because it’s familiar:
It’s comforting in a special way because as long as you’re beating yourself up, you know that you won’t just become someone who doesn’t care at all, and caves into being worthless, or fill in the blank with whatever it is that we fear most that we are.
What I realized the other day, was something remembered:
That the amount of joy you can derive from something is actually infinite. Classical economists know this – it’s the reason that they created the util YOU-til in the first place, the theoretical measurement of satisfaction – as a PROXY for measurement of something that is inherently impervious to objective measurement, but is only truly subjectively experienced by the person. Completely intangible. Happiness is exactly relative, not at all dependent on material things. Are you able to tap into that infinite well?
One man can be 10x happier with a single chip at that poker table than a person can with 100 of their own.
What if you started approaching the problem with a different strategy – how much goodness, and joy, and enjoyment can I squeeze out of the things I already have? Then whether or not I add to my material wealth, the value of my emotional portfolio goes up every year?
A secondary question comes to my mind for you: “What prevents me from doing that now?”
When your life ends, if you had not a single dollar more than you have right now, but you were actually enjoying it 100x more than you are right now, would that at least be interesting to consider?
It’s more than possible. It’s actually not hard to achieve at all. What’s difficult is finding the tool to help you do it, and letting go of the scorecard you’re keeping on your material progress while you muck your way through your uniquely personal and wonderful problem set of being human on earth in the 21st century.
If you want to take it even further, I present to you that if you even had less value in the bank, if you ended broke and penniless – and you could still be happy regardless, happier than you are right now, would that not be the best insurance plan imaginable?
I’m about to sign off of here for now, so let me send you away with a two inspirational challenges:
1) Ask yourself, What does it look like to change the causality of your equation – to mentally choose a causality in alignment with your real values? What would it look like to turn the equation from success = having more chips at the end than at the beginning, to success = having more gross enjoyment overall by the end, independent of the number of total chips?
2) The shortest path? Start spending our money DIRECTLY on what we value most.
Alright my friend, I am holding a ton of love and respect for you right now, thank you for spending your precious time with me, and I hope you will share this episode with a loved one if it made a difference for you. easy share link: bit.ly/cicada007