I hardly need to convince anyone that gratitude is a good thing. For years, everyone from Oprah Winfrey to psychologist Monica Bartlett have been stressing the contribution of gratitude to a happier, calmer, even physically healthier life.
So what I’m going to focus on today isn’t how gratitude makes you happy, but how it helps writers grow their careers. I’m not talking about airy notions of spiritual attraction here, but actual, tangible benefits. Here are four ways:
1. Gratitude deepens your vision. Writing is all about your view of the universe. The more you see and experience, the richer and more dimensional your writing becomes. If you go through life without feeling grateful, that vision is limited. It’s like walking through life with blinders that screen out an essential aspect of the human experience. Everyone can see the obstacles and disappointments along the way: There’s nothing special about that. But having an equally clear view of the joys and satisfactions broadens and opens up your understanding of the world, and that has a powerful impact on the depth and fullness of your writing.
2. Gratitude makes you resilient. There may be a writer or two somewhere who haven’t experienced failure, but I don’t know any. Not one. Writing is a competitive, difficult, challenging profession, full of setbacks and rejection. I have coached many writers who didn’t know how they could keep going in the face of a significant failure. I’ve been there myself. But the writer who isn’t able to eventually bounce back from the pain of rejected manuscripts and failed books is simply not going to make it.
Gratitude is one of the best tonics for restoring yourself in the face of the major and minor disappointments of the writing life. Remembering how lucky you are simply to be able to write, feeling grateful for past achievements, and thanking the people who’ve believed in you despite your failures, makes it much easier to shake off the discouragement and get back in the saddle.
3. Gratitude enables you to persist. The most important ingredient to a successful writing career isn’t talent, luck, or even hard work (although all of those things help), but persistence. “This is one huge way in which you can put the odds of being published as a fiction writer much more on your side,” writes Tracy Culleton.“Keep going when it seems impossible.” John Hewitt agrees: “To embrace writing as a career you need to be persistent. . . The career in writing belongs to the person who gets up the next day and gets back to work, either improving what they have or creating something new.”
Gratitude is rocket fuel for persistence. When you feel grateful, it is much easier to summon the energy and confidence to keep working, day after day, week after week—and yes, even year after year. Besides, when you are consistently aware of the people who have supported you through those years, it becomes pretty hard to simply give up.
4. Gratitude helps you identify, attract, and connect with people who can help you. I promised no spiritual attraction stuff here, and I’m sticking with that promise. This isn’t about some sort of magical vibration that brings good things to people because they think about them—it’s about being a positive, joyful person who knows a good thing when she sees one.
Like it or not, your writing career depends on a huge number of other people—editors, publishers, agents, teachers, marketers, and many others. Grateful people are good at recognizing when someone is willing to help them—and their appreciation of others makespeople want to offer assistance. If you keep your eyes shut to the support others have given, you can be sure you’re going to get less of it in the future. Be the person who truly feels blessed by the help of others and see what happens.
There are dozens of resources for people who are thinking of developing a gratitude practice—or who just want to feel a little more grateful for what they have. Tomorrow, I’ll post some of the things I think are especially useful in helping writers create an attitude of gratitude.