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Gratefulness: Find
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Gratitude Is
Personal
The day Andrew Carnegie retired, he gave away $11.2 million. The
first $5 million went for libraries and for disability and pension
funds for Carnegie Steel Company employees.
“I make this first use
of surplus wealth upon retiring from business,” he wrote in the
letter dispersing the funds, “as an acknowledgement of the deep debt
I owe to the workmen who have contributed so greatly to my success.”
By the end of his
life, Carnegie had given away everything he had earned. His will
dispersed the last $30 million of an estate that had been ten to
twenty times that size, leaving his bank account empty.
Much of Carnegie’s generosity was motivated by
gratitude, and he had a way of tracing the benefits in his life to
specific people or groups of people. Indeed, this is appropriate
because gratefulness is ultimately a personal quality. It is
expressing appreciation to someone.
An individual
may first begin to be grateful because of some benefit
he recognizes in his life. This is a reason for
gratefulness, but it is not the whole of gratefulness.
Once he recognizes he has a reason to be
grateful, he next must discern the cause of that benefit. In
Carnegie’s case, he could cite the growth of the steel industry, the
production levels of his Pittsburgh plants, and a dozen other
factors. However, behind each of these factors in his success,
individual men and women were to be thanked.
From Colonel Anderson – whose library played such a
vital role in Carnegie’s childhood education – to factory workers
and tenant farmers in his employment, Carnegie was grateful not only
for the benefits, but also for the people who brought benefit
to himself and to others.
Gratefulness is complete only after the benefit has been
traced back to those responsible for making it possible. This is
the personal nature of gratefulness – it is expressed by
a person, to a person.
A little thought will usually reveal a lengthy list of
people who deserve to be thanked. The fact is, gratefulness is a
debt. The more we realize the number of people to whom we owe a
debt of gratitude, the more overwhelmed we may become at the
impossibility of ever adequately thanking them all. That sense of
debt is the spirit of gratefulness, and it should motivate us to do
the best we can to show gratitude to the people behind our benefits
while always recognizing we owe much more than we can ever repay.
Find on the Job
There are more people deserving our gratitude than we can ever
repay. But who are the ones whose investment is least often
recognized? Who are the individuals in your sphere of work and life
whose jobs are often thankless because their efforts are taken for
granted or generally unnoticed?
There are two groups of people who should take priority
in your gratefulness. First, those who make the most significant
and direct investments in your left – especially those supporting
you on a regular basis (e.g., family and close coworkers). Then,
when considering the rest of your own gratitude diagram, give
priority to thanking those whom others are mot likely to overlook.
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