What Gratitude Actually Requires

My daughter woke up crying on Thursday morning, just because she’s grateful for who she is, what she has, and her life around her. She’s sixteen, so I’m sure there were a few other things mixed in too, but the lesson wasn’t lost on me.

I’ve never once woken up in tears because of gratitude. Have I been missing something?
This year has really humbled me.

Not in the way people say when they win an award… actually humbled me. The kind where you sit with "I missed things" and "I don't have this figured out" longer than you'd like.

Humility doesn’t come up very often when we talk about success. The two seem to fly in the face of one another.

On one hand, you need a certain amount of ego or confidence to believe you can do something that many others can’t. It’s hard to stand on top of that mountain and say you're humble. That usually comes off to me as disingenuous.

On the other hand, ego is almost always the first thing that trips someone up. You get out a little too far over your skis, and you can wipe out. People don’t like to see this, that’s why you hear that voice in your head reminding you not to get too big for your britches or forget where you came from.

Wait, just me? Got it…

We’re told that success is about looking through the windshield; what's ahead, the next step, the next mountain. Humility feels like it slows you down. Like you’re looking backward while you’re trying to move forward.

But what I'm realizing again, and you may have heard me say this before: The mountain has no top. The real way to measure your success isn't by looking forward. It's by turning around and seeing how far you've come, and more importantly, recognizing everything that contributed to getting you there.

Here's what I've never connected until this week: gratitude and humility aren't just related. One requires the other.

You can go through the motions of gratitude - say thank you, count your blessings, make your list. But if you're still quietly convinced you did it all yourself, that's not gratitude. That's inventory.

Gratitude without humility isn't gratitude. It's just keeping score.

And humility isn't just one thing. It works in two directions.

Looking back, it's admitting you didn't get here alone. The breaks, the timing, the people who showed up… they mattered, and probably more than you want to admit.

Looking forward, it's recognizing you're not done yet. That you haven't figured it all out. That there's still work to do - and some of it is work you didn't even know you were missing.

That second one is where I've been living lately.

The last couple of years took me from feeling lost, to slowly putting pieces together, to getting excited about something again, to building, and then (because this is how it goes) to realizing how many things I missed the first time around.

Every time I think I'm moving forward, there's something else I didn't see. It's frustrating. It's humbling. And it's probably exactly how growth is supposed to feel when you're in the middle of it.

Here's the thing: my kids wake up happy. My family gets together, and we love each other. We’ve been having a blast, whether it’s cleaning the house for Friendsgiving, decorating the house for the holidays (including the leg lamp in my front window, which delights my neighbors across the street more than I will ever understand), or playing air hockey in the basement til we’re sore.

When I look around at what actually matters, it's all there.

And when I think about the times I've gone sideways (to whatever extent I have), it's been when I lost focus on that; when I stopped being humble, when I stopped being grateful.

Turns out they're the same thing.

None of this means you stop reaching. Humility and audacious goals aren't opposites. You can want more and still recognize you're not there yet. You can aim high and still be grateful for how far you've come. In fact, I think that's the only way the big goals stay healthy.

I don't have all of this figured out, but I'm paying attention. That's enough for now.

Happy Thanksgiving.
JB