Do this for 60 seconds a day and you’ll be 25% happier.

Published in

Be Yourself

4 min readAug 5, 2016

I like to write about the little ideas or changes that have had a big impact on my ability to enjoy life.

One of the best ones I’ve received came from Jesse Israel. (Founder of MediClub and one of the most naturally gifted leaders I know)

We were talking about meditation and the infrequency of my practice.

I forget how we got there, but Jesse said there was a “gratitude meditation” that he often fell back on when strapped for time and in need of a less demanding way to meditate.

It was simple. Really, really simple.

Gratitude meditation — when you wake up and when you go to bed.

(I never realized that you could be grateful for the future until I started doing this)

Das it. You just “meditated” in less than 60 seconds.

You envelop your entire perception of the day in the abundance and appreciation of all that’s right in the world and the good stuff yet to come.

This isn’t all about gratitude, happiness, or mindfulness. It’s also about effectiveness and productivity.

Here’s what I mean. If you wake up in the morning with a more positive outlook and pro-active perception of the world, how do you think it is going to impact your energy? Your conversations? Your belief in yourself? Your creativity? Your ability to get things done? All the things.

You are not what you do, you are what you do consistently

I subscribe to the idea that the habits we commit to are what truly make us who we are…this seemed like a “meditation” that I could finally commit to.

On top of that, my company mission statement literally says “we exist to spread gratitude and authentic connection in the world.” It was about time I committed to practicing gratitude in an intentional manner.

So I started in and surely enough, I was able to continue the practice with almost complete consistency. Once in the morning and once at night.

Not only that, I would start to do it out loud with my GF Miki and friends when they were around. It took no effort and it is so simple, that no one ever has any reason for opting out.

In reality, I’ve always found it challenging to find a consistent time for meditation and that led to infrequency. The gratitude meditation was easy. This fit into my schedule without any major changes at all, I didn’t need to find any new time that I was telling myself I didn’t have.

How did it change me?

I started to think about this last week. I was out at Daybreaker with some friends. One of my buddies asked how things were going at a Tribute.

The reality is that we were doing a lot of challenging things in the realm of digital marketing and going through a frustrating week of tests:

I looked back at him and half yelled, “it’s really fucking hard!!”

He laughed and looked back at me, “why are you smiling?”

I chuckled at myself and thought about it: I realized in that moment that it was gratitude. I felt that I was wrapped in this bubble of appreciation for all the beauty around me and also the beauty that I believe is yet to come (despite it being a tough week).

So in essence, the difficult, hard elements of my life were in this constant subconscious contrast with all the good in my life.

Because I had committed to gratitude as a practice, the good just seemed to significantly outweigh the bad.

And this is not to say that you can’t get sad or drained…Miki can tell you that I came home and literally collapsed in frustration because of a terrible day with my nose deep in Google Analytics. That’s human and we’re allowed to go there.

But, the next day I was better and the day after that I was even better. That is gratitude. And the 60 seconds gratitude meditation made it so.

If you don’t have time for gratitude, you don’t have time for life.
— Tony Robbins

Gratitude makes what we have enough.

It makes the good things great.

It makes us more capable of enduring the challenging things in our life.

Happiness and health are two cornerstones of a good life. Gratitude is the simplest path to both.

And that’s not woo woo affirmations…SCIENCE FTW.

The science of gratitude (this shit works!)

In short, physical and health related research done by institutions like the Greater Good Science Center, and studies on cardiovascular quality by The American Heart Association have shown that positive thinking has some crazy incredible health benefits including the following: