Gratitude is a secret weapon for attracting more opportunities

There are a lot of personal attributes and social behaviors that unlock opportunities. In the US a positive attitude, gratitude, and genuine interest are among them. In general just being pleasant to be around and personable will get you far in the engineering world because those qualities are often times lacking. When people managers are making decisions about resourcing I think that they are not honest with themselves about how much them 'liking' a person goes into their decision making process. Same for hiring.

If you are a terse and dour person, it isn't that you will experience more rejection per-se, it is just that opportunities will not even be presented to you because the person with the opportunity doesn't want to spend time in your presence.

Gratitude, kindness, and explicit acknowledgement of appreciation for others really does go a long way.

However, I feel like I've been meeting more people in the workplace who read articles like this and implement it in a robotic, forced manner. Like they're using it as a tool to get what they want out of others, as opposed to a genuine expression of how they feel. Genuine gratitude goes much further than just going through the motions because an online article said it was a good thing to do.

Gratitude certainly unlocks more opportunities. The neat thing about gratitude is that if you practice it you find inner peace and don’t need the opportunities to be happy.

I was in a few finance/crypto spaces (voice chat rooms on Twitter) with CEOs/CTOs/industry experts over the past week and it weirded me out how everyone would do this 30 second ass-kissing speech before and after speaking. Some people would even randomly butt in out of nowhere and start giving gratitude to all speakers, triggering a chain of gratitude speeches from other speakers which provided no value at all to the discussion.

Not sure if this is an American/corp-speak thing but it was the first time i really noticed it taking up so much bandwidth in the conversation to the point of annoyance.

I've always been profoundly struck by Dostoyevsky's depiction of the devil. In The Brothers Karamazov, the devil says: "My best feelings, gratitude, for example, are formally forbidden solely because of my social position." It's something I think about very often.

Transcribed from @mhdksafa:

"I noticed that our lovely janitor gets treated like an outcast, so I made sure to drink my coffee with him daily in front of the gate. Today I was in a hurry to get to my office, so he came to my office with a cup of coffee and awkwardly goes "Thank you for being my friend."

Before I had much of a network, and I was going through recruiters to find jobs, I would give them feedback on the interviews they sent me out on. A lot of times, they only had a vague idea of what they were filling, and this would help them out in narrowing their search.

I know this could have been prepping my own competition. I know that there are lots of opportunities going through each recruiter, and I want them thinking of me. It seemed to work well.

Sometimes you just have to train them, and I was training them to be a better recruiter in general, but also for me.

There's a system at Amazon that lets customer service reps communicate with you after a call. I think it may even be a successor to the one Steve Yegge wrote about whose UI was Emacs.

Anyhoo, I called to complain because of the two orders I placed at Amazon in the past few weeks, one -- a video game -- arrived without media and the other didn't arrive at all. I'm beginning to think that with inflation and Amazon working conditions being what they are, there are people in the fulfillment chain just helping themselves to customer orders and reporting them delivered as intended. The CS rep processed the refund on the second package (I ordered a replacement for the first that arrived just fine) and I recommended she relay my complaints, with a word that these incidents jeopardize my willingness to do further business with Amazon, to higher ups at the service department and she agreed to do so. I thanked her for her help and ended the call.

Few hours later I get an email through this system. The rep, whose name is "Princess", sent a personal note to tell me how much she appreciated how I was on the call, citing my "warm approach".

Wherever you are, Princess, know that it was nothing. It's Jeff Bezos who needs to get his act together, and people like you are just on the front lines, catching hell from cranky bastards like me. I'm happy to show appreciation for help when it is given.

Please avoid the compliment sandwich. And please, as Jerry Springer would tell us, "Take care of yourself, and each other." And don't bounce checks.

People like to think that this is something that you can "just do" if you try hard enough.

While there is some control, much of the positive attributes a person can have are genetic, as much as 50%, I've read. Nothing you can do about it.

For example of this, let's look at infants. We all know some infants and babies are wonderful and everyone wants to be around them, and others are not.

You know what I mean - the baby who smiles and coos and giggles and holds their arms up to be picked up, even by strangers, they are happy and trusting. Meanwhile, some kids cry, frown, are fearful. This all happens in infants, before they even really understand the environment or get kicked in the teeth to make them like that. Kids are like this almost straight out of the womb - 2 weeks into the world.

All I'm saying is that there is a massive genetic component to disposition, I don't think this is too controversial if you think upon it.

So those people who are born with a great disposition go through life that is easier if people like them more.

People with bad genetic disposition can work on it, sure, but they are starting from a 50% disadvantage, and having to work twice as hard is extremely difficult, because it is a 24/7 thing. It's not natural, so you have to be thinking about it all the time, whereas in one with good genetics, they are at 100% right at birth so they don't even have to bother working on being a good person that everyone likes. Opportunities come to them unbidden. Even the people giving the opportunities don't see it that way, they just do it, because...why wouldn't they?

This is only a rough framework, I know there are many variables. It's a stripped down view. But that's how I see it.

Gratitude = Weapon?

Some real 1984 type shit

Yeah, this is what the trust fund kids I know keep telling me. I don't get why it works for them and not for me!

Gratitude only works when it's serious, instead of a target metric like described here.

If gratitude is transactional (seen as a way to increase likelihood of getting something later) -- is it really gratitude?

“Once we have made the decision to turn back to the ways of duty, gratitude will flow naturally into us, and… gratitude is the precondition of joy. Only those who give thanks are able to rejoice, for only they are conscious that life, freedom and well-being are not rights but gifts.“

I did like the (probably fantastical) characterisation of Oskar Schindler in Spielberg's movie.

I think what matters more than anything is authenticity. Setting your intention on authenticity with the mindset of appreciation is what allows genuine gratitude otherwise it generates phonyism. Then you get comments like @wolongong942

Gratitude is a secret weapon for pretty much everything.

I mean if you are grateful because it could attract more opportunities you're not very grateful, just opportunist

When I think of gratitude in corporate setting, I get reminded of Mary Beth Brown, the secretary who worked for Elon Musk for twelve years. She got fired for asking a raise after twelve years [1]. I think she must have been more grateful for having a job and should not have asked for a raise.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-known-about-Elon-Musks-long-ti...

Gratitude is overrated and over-applied, and often prescribed disingenuously. Resentment, it's opposite, is poison in the modern world. Resentment is an impulse that amounts to a shallow middle finger, and if you try to use it for long-term motivation you become unstable. Many people turn to intentional gratitude as an antidote to resentment, but it's often an overcompensation.

Become too grateful and you deny the state of the world, your motivation shifts and you become an unwitting agent of the status quo. And maybe the status quo isn't all that bad, but it does prevent striving to make it better. Monks and Nuns of various religions are probably some of the most active practitioners of intentional gratitude. They also have minimal impact on improving peoples' quality of life.

No wonder corporations love prescribing it, corporations are ultimately authoritarian dictatorships and/or oligarchies. Gratitude nips any rebellion in the bud at the lowest possible cost. Why create a startup that out-competes an old, incompetent dinosaur of a business when you can spend those hours appreciating ice cream and the fact that you have a roof over your head, didn't die in a car crash that day, and don't suffer from any chronic diseases that don't usually hit your age demographic anyway?

So by all means, don't be resentful be content, but save your gratitude for improvements, strive to enact those improvements if you can. And don't be afraid to use negative emotion as a pointer for where to start.