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36. Going Solo

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  Roald Dahl

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Humor

Info:  209 pages, published 1986

Format:  Book

Summary 

Going Solo is the autobiographical sequel of Boy, which is written by the world-famous author Roald Dahl (author of many famous children’s books including personal favorites Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox).  It is about his life as a worker with the Shell Company in Africa and an RAF fighter pilot during World War II.  Dahl hilariously recounts stories from his adventurous life as a young man, out on his own and ready to conquer the world.

Quotes

“A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones.”

“What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!”

“I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible.  Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.”

“Mary Welland was certainly lovely. She was gentle and kind. She remained my friend all the time I was in hospital. But there is a world of difference falling in love with a voice and remaining in love with a person you can see. From the moment I opened my eyes, Mary became a human instead of a dream and my passion evaporated.”

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35. The Year of Magical Thinking

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  N/A

Author:  Joan Didion

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

Info:  227 pages, published February 13, 2007

Format:  Book

Summary 

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, one of the country’s most famous writers, explores the grief she suffered as the result of the death of her husband John Dunne and the life threatening illness of their only child, Quintana.  Didion creates a portrait of loss by her portrayal of married and family life.

Quotes

 “We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living.”

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

“I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”

“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”

“In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be “healing.” A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to “get through it,” rise to the occasion, exhibit the “strength” that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved.”

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.  As we were.  As we are no longer.  As we will one day not be at all.”

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34. Rise of the Robots : Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Chris Funk (my Dad)

Author:  Martin Ford

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Futuristic

Info:  352 pages, published May 5, 2015

Format:  Book

Summary 

In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford discusses what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and warns employers and policy makers to face the implications.  As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary.  The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work, and we must decide soon whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity.  This book helps you understand what accelerating technology means for your economic prospects and those of your children, as well as for society as a whole.

 

Quotes

“Imagine that you get in your car and begin driving at 5 miles per hour. You drive for a minute, accelerate to double your speed to 10 mph, drive for another minute, double your speed again, and so on. The really remarkable thing is not simply the fact of the doubling but the amount of ground you cover after the process has gone on for a while. In the first minute, you would travel about 440 feet. In the third minute at 20 mph, you’d cover 1,760 feet. In the fifth minute, speeding along at 80 mph, you would go well over a mile. To complete the sixth minute, you’d need a faster car—as well as a racetrack. Now think about how fast you would be traveling—and how much progress you would make in that final minute—if you doubled your speed twenty-seven times. That’s roughly the number of times computing power has doubled since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. The revolution now under way is happening not just because of the acceleration itself but because that acceleration has been going on for so long that the amount of progress we can now expect in any given year is potentially mind-boggling. The answer to the question about your speed in the car, by the way, is 671 million miles per hour. In that final, twenty-eighth minute, you would travel more than 11 million miles. Five minutes or so at that speed would get you to Mars. That, in a nutshell, is where information technology stands today, relative to when the first primitive integrated circuits started plodding along in the late 1950s.”

“In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.  Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.”

“Indeed, a 2013 study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne at the University of Oxford concluded that occupations amounting to nearly half of US total employment may be vulnerable to automation within roughly the next two decades.”

“Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.  HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.”

“Imagine the uproar when Uber’s cars start arriving without drivers.”

“In Japan, a new machine is able to select ripe strawberries based on subtle color variations and then pick a strawberry every eight seconds—working continuously and doing most of the work at night.”

“In a recent analysis, Martin Grötschel of the Zuse Institute in Berlin found that, using the computers and software that existed in 1982, it would have taken a full eighty-two years to solve a particularly complex production planning problem. As of 2003, the same problem could be solved in about a minute—an improvement by a factor of around 43 million. Computer hardware became about 1,000 times faster over the same period, which means that improvements in the algorithms used accounted for approximately a 43,000-fold increase in performance.”

“acquiring more education and skills will not necessarily offer effective protection against job automation”

“We eventually will have to move away from the idea that workers support retirees and pay for social programs, and instead adopt the premise that our overall economy supports these things. Economic growth, after all, has significantly outpaced the rate at which new jobs have been created and wages have been rising.”

“potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings.” The result would be massive unemployment, soaring inequality, and, ultimately, falling demand for goods and services as consumers increasingly lacked the purchasing power necessary to continue driving economic growth.”

“Knowing the ideological predisposition of a particular economist is often a better predictor of what that individual is likely to say than anything contained in the data under examination.”

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27. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Andrea Banks

Author:  Jean-Dominique Bauby

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

Info:  132 pages, published June 23, 1998

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young childen, a 44-year-old man known and loved for his wit, his style, and his impassioned approach to life.  By the end of the year he was also the victim of a rare kind of stroke to the brainstem which left in him in a state of locked in syndrome.  Only his left eye functioned, allowing him to see and, by blinking it, to communicate with the outside world.  Amazingly, he dictated his Memoir, a word at a time, blinking to select each letter as the alphabet was recited to him slowly, over and over again.  In magical sequences, he imagines traveling to other places and times and of lying next to the woman he loves.  Fed only intravenously, he imagines preparing and tasting the full flavor of his favorite foods.  Again and again he returns to an “inexhaustible reservoir of sensations,” keeping in touch with himself and the life around him.  Jean-Dominique Bauby died two days after the French publication of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Quotes

“But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”

“The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mithra-Grandchamp is the women we were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner.”

“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”

“Once, I was a master at recycling leftovers. Now I cultivate the art of simmering memories.”

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

“Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic.”

“Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter – when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”

“But I see in the clothes a symbol of continuing life. And proof that I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches the home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede.  My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

“I hoard all these letters like treasure.  One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.  It will keep the vultures at bay?

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26. Rich Like Them:  My Door-to-Door Search for the Secrets of Wealth in America’s Richest Neighborhoods

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Ryan D’Agostino

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Finance 

Info:  256 pages, published January 5, 2009

Format:  Audiobook

 

Summary 

Ryan D’Agostino, former senior editor at Money, knocked on 500 doors in the twenty wealthiest zip codes in the U.S. to discover how people got rich.  He met with a wide variety of men and women who shared their most difficult financial decisions, toughest setbacks, greatest strategies, most triumphant moments, and deepest insights.  In Rich Like Them,  D’Agostino shares what he found.  The best pieces of advice:   

Connect the people you meet

Once you connect the dots, then follow through

Don’t deviate from your planned path to get a quick gain

Perseverance doesn’t take forever

Do one thing and do it well

Don’t plan a career – plan a life

Never stop being a student

Calculate every risk – even the one you live in

Don’t worry about what other people think

If you hate your career, um, change it

Sometimes the biggest risk is doing nothing

Never let pride get in the way of profit

Be humble even if you’re as rich as Brooke Astor

Understand your limitations

Don’t be a slave to Plan A – it’ll prevent you from seeing Plan B

 

Quotes

“Anyone can find herself at the right place at the right time but if you don’t recognize that and don’t work hard to take advantage of it or if you’re lazy you’re unfocused you can be at the best possible place at the best possible time and still end up making $70,000 instead of $700,000.

“Never let pride get in the way of profit.”

“A humble person never believes he knows everything or has done everything, and that’s what keeps him working hard. He believes there is always more he can learn, that he can always do a better job next time, and that hard work is just part of getting better.”

“When you fail miserably, be thankful.”

“Humility makes it OK to roll up your sleeves and stay late when no one else does it.  To make your own coffee instead of having an assistant.  Humility makes you work harder.”

“ Money is simply a tool, to make a good life and to make other lives good.”

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23. Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:  Henri Nouwen

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Christian, Theology

Info:  63 pages, published October 15, 2004

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Out of Solitude is a reflection on the tension between the desire for solitude and the demands of everyday life.   It was in solitude that Jesus found the courage to follow God’s will and Out of Solitude demonstrates that meaningful love and service must spring from a living relationship with God.

 

Quotes

“When we start being too impressed by the results of our work, we slowly come to the erroneous conviction that life is one large scoreboard where someone is listing the points to measure our worth. And before we are fully aware of it, we have sold our soul to the many grade-givers. That means we are not only in the world, but also of the world. Then we become what the world makes us. We are intelligent because someone gives us a high grade. We are helpful because someone says thanks. We are likable because someone likes us. And we are important because someone considers us indispensable. In short, we are worthwhile because we have successes. And the more we allow our accomplishments — the results of our actions — to become the criteria of our self-esteem, the more we are going to walk on our mental and spiritual toes, never sure if we will be able to live up to the expectations which we created by our last successes. In many people’s lives, there is a nearly diabolic chain in which their anxieties grow according to their successes. This dark power has driven many of the greatest artists into self-destruction.”

“Jesus changes our history from a random series of sad incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity for a change of heart.”

“Is God present or is he absent? Maybe we can say now that in the center of our sadness for his absence we can find the first signs of his presence. And that in the middle of our longings we discover the footprints of the one who has created them. It is in the faithful waiting for the loved one that we know how much he has filled our lives already. Just as the love of a mother for her son can grow while she is waiting for his return, and just as lovers can rediscover each other during long periods of absence, so also our intimate relationship with God can become deeper and more mature while we wait patiently in expectation for his return.”

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

“This leaves us with the urgent question: How can we be or become a caring community, a community of people not trying to cover the pain or to avoid it by sophisticated bypasses, but rather share it as the source of healing and new life? It is important to realize that you cannot get a Ph.D. in caring, that caring cannot be delegated by specialists, and that therefore nobody can be excused from caring. Still, in a society like ours, we have a strong tendency to refer to specialists. When someone does not feel well, we quickly think, ‘Where can we find a doctor?’ When someone is confused, we easily advise him to go to a counselor. And when someone is dying, we quickly call a priest. Even when someone wants to pray we wonder if there is a minister around.”

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22. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: 

Author:  Gary Keller

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Business

Info:  240 pages, published April 1, 2013

Format:  Book

Summary 

The goal of The ONE Thing is to help you focus your time and energy on one thing at a time.   Keller argues that to keep yourself from getting distracted and stressed out by the daily onslaught of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings, you need to learn how to focus on one thing.

The book promises that if you can do this, you will cut through the clutter, achieve better results in less time, build momentum toward your goal, control your stress,  revive your energy, stay on track, and achieve extraordinary results in every area of your life–work, personal, family, and spiritual.

 

Quotes

“Multitasking is a lie.”

“Success is actually a short race – A sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.”

“Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

“You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”

“The pursuit of mastery bears gifts.”

“A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the one way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets.”

“Success is actually a short race—a sprint fueled by discipline just long enough for habit to kick in and take over.”

“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

“Long hours spent checking off a to-do list and ending the day with a full trash can and a clean desk are not virtuous and have nothing to do with success. Instead of a to-do list, you need a success list—a list that is purposefully created around extraordinary results.  To-do lists tend to be long; success lists are short. One pulls you in all directions; the other aims you in a specific direction. One is a disorganized directory and the other is an organized directive. If a list isn’t built around success, then that’s not where it takes you. If your to-do list contains everything, then it’s probably taking you everywhere but where you really want to go.”

“Success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.  The one thing

The more we use our mind, the less minding power we have.  Willpower is like a fast twitch muscle that gets tired and needs rest.  It is incredibly powerful, but it has no endurance.”

“Do your most important work – you’re one thing – early, before your willpower is drawn down.”

“To achieve an extraordinary result you must choose what matters most and give it all the time it demands.”

“Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls.  The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity.  And you’re keeping all of them in the air.  But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball.  If you drop it, it will bounce back.  The other four balls – family, health, friends, integrity – are made of glass.  If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.”

“Don’t fear big.  Fear mediocrity.  Fear waste.  Fear the lack of living to your fullest.”

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21.  Why Not Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  Mindy Kaling

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Humor

Info:  240 pages, published September 15, 2015

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary 

In Why Not Me?, Kaling, writer and actor on “The Office” and “The Mindy Project,” shares a series of essays that provide hilarious details from her personal and professional life, from new friendships to beauty tips.  A follow up to her earlier Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, which is also very funny and covers her childhood and young adult years, Why Not Me? focuses on Kaling’s Hollywood career and adult personal life. 

 

Quotes

“Who is the beauty icon who inspires you most?  Is it Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Halle Berry?  Mine is Nofestreau because that vampire taught me my number one and number two favorite beauty tricks.  Avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.”

“People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them.”

“the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.” 

“People don’t say “Give me your honest opinion” because they want an honest opinion. They say it because it’s rude to say “Please tell me I’m amazing.”

“People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man’s touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don’t understand how you could have self-confidence if you don’t do the work… I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a ‘workaholic.’ Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.”

“Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn’t always mean your parents. If you do that, you will be fine.”

“As I got older, I got craftier and less obvious, but I’ve always put a lot of energy and effort into people liking me. That’s why I’ve never understood the compliment “effortless.” People love to say: “She just walked into the party, charming people with her effortless beauty.” I don’t understand that at all. What’s so wrong with effort, anyway? It means you care. What about the girl who “walked into the party, her determination to please apparent on her eager face”? Sure, she might seem a little crazy, and, yes, maybe everything she says sounds like conversation starters she found on a website, but at least she’s trying. Let’s give her a shot!” 

“I want to say one last thing, and it’s important. Though I am a generally happy person who feels comfortable in my skin, I do beat myself up because I am influenced by a societal pressure to be thin. All the time. I feel it the same way anybody who picks up a magazine and sees Keira Knightley’s elegantly bony shoulder blades poking out of a backless dress does. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my shoulder blades once. Honestly, I’m dubious that any part of my body could be so sharp and firm as to be described as a “blade.” I feel it when I wake up in the morning and try on every single pair of my jeans and everything looks bad and I just want to go back to sleep. But my secret is: even though I wish I could be thin, and that I could have the ease of lifestyle that I associate with being thin, I don’t wish for it with all of my heart. Because my heart is reserved for way more important things.” 

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20. Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping

Rating:  ☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:  Judith Levine

Genre:  Non-Fiction

Info: 280 pages, published September 24, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Author Judith Levine writes about the year-long experiment that she conducted with her partner Paul where they decided to stop all buying anything but the most necessary purchases.It is harder than she anticipates, but Levine gains new insight into our consumerist culture and economy.

 

My Take

This was really a book fail.  I picked it up from the Library based on its subject matter as I had made a 2016 New Year’s resolution to have a “no-buy” year.  I really did not want any more stuff coming into my already full house.  Unfortunately, Not Buying It was more of a political screed and offered little in the way of helpful advice.  Best to “not buy it” and avoid this book.

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18. 365 Days of Thank You’s

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  N/A

Author:  John Kralick

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info:  240 pages, published December 28, 2010

Format:  Book

Summary 

At the age of 53, John Kralik’s life was at a miserably low point.  He was 40 pounds overweight, his girlfriend had just broken up with him, he was living in a tiny apartment with inadequate heating and cooling, his law firm was failing, he was going through a painful second divorce, he had become estranged from his two older children and was afraid he might lose contact with his young daughter and all of his dreams–including becoming a judge, seemed hopelessly out of reach.  

Instead of lamenting his plight, John decided to find some way to be grateful for what he had rather than focus on what he didn’t.  Inspired by a beautiful, simple note his ex-girlfriend had sent to thank him for his Christmas gift, John thought he might find a way to feel grateful by writing thank-you notes. He set a goal of writing 365 thank-you notes in the coming year.  Every day, he began to hand write thank you notes, to his clients who paid their bills on time, to friends and relatives for gifts or kindnesses he’d received, to anyone else to whom he was appreciative.  Soon after sending his first notes, John noticed that good things started happening, from financial gain to friendship, from weight loss to inner peace.  Before long, his whole life turned around.  

Quotes

“One of the most comforting aspects of writing a thank-you note was that it produced a tangible product.  Although I was giving it away and not keeping a copy, I felt I had introduced something into the world that made a small positive difference.  A piece of paper that would most certainly have been thrown out had been turned into a concrete expression of gratitude to someone else — and would have a positive effect by reminding a person that they had touched me in a positive way.”

“Scott, Thank you for taking the time each morning to greet me in a friendly way.  It is also so wonderful to me that you took the time and trouble to remember my name.  In this day and age, few people make this effort, and fewer still do it in a way that feels sincere.  You do both.  It really makes a difference to me every day.”

“Life is very short.  You need to do what you think will make you happy.”

“Then I heard a voice: “Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have,” it said, “you will not receive the things you want.”

“If the voice I’d heard in the mountains had implied that I would get all that I wanted, it seemed, at least at this juncture, that it was a promise unfulfilled. Yet, by being thankful for what I had, I realized that I had everything I needed.”

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