Brian Gubernick explains the Jar of Awesome, a Tim Ferriss technique where you write down small wins on slips of paper and save them. When you're struggling, you pull from the jar to remember what went right. It builds momentum and gratitude by forcing you to notice daily achievements instead of always chasing the next goal.
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Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into it. Today is going to be a fun topic. I want to talk about celebrating small wins. I want to talk about gratitude. And I want to talk about the jar of awesome and how all of these things tie together. Now, the jar of awesome. Let me first say, this is not my idea. This is something I first read about in Tim Ferriss's book, Tools of Titans, which is one of my favorite reference manuals, something that should be living on everybody's desks or coffee tables. It's just that awesome. That one, as well as his other book, Tribe of Mentors. That is similar in the way it presents lessons from, from the best of the best. Anyhow, in Tools of Titans, he describes this jar of awesome. What Tim says is that so many of us were striving to be bigger and better tomorrow. I mean, that's what the No Days Off podcast and the No Days Off Nation, that's what we're all about, right? Like, I want to get better than I was yesterday, and every day I want to take a minute or 5 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it may be to get better. That's what No Days Off stands for. Well, if you aspire to be more, you have a tendency to focus on the future and you move oftentimes at a rapid clip and you don't necessarily appreciate the accomplishments each and every day. You don't maybe share gratitude around those things or even recognize the progress that you've been made, that you've been making. When things don't go your way, looking on the bright side sometimes is a real test of your ability to, to be grateful for what you have, to show gratitude. No one's really great. No one's really perfect. I should say some are great, but no one's perfect at showing gratitude at first. But Tim Ferriss presents this idea around the jar of awesome and how this idea can in fact help. And how does it help? It puts in plain sight all the good things that have been accomplished and what's happened, you know, what's been happening in your life in the positive that you could take a look at when things may not be looking bright, when things may not be going your way. Here's how the, here's how this works. You have this giant Mason jar, okay? Or whatever your jar may be. And what you're doing with this jar is you're capturing all of those cool moments on little pieces of paper, almost like creating your own little fortune cookies, capturing these cool moments that you're just not going to remember in a week or a month later. Whenever something great happens, you know, maybe it's the scale has you 1 pound lighter today, or you had a great sales call, or your kid You know, maybe, maybe she had a perfect score on a test. Whenever something great happened, happens, write it down on a slip of paper and throw it into the big jar, the big jar of awesome. In writing it down, you're, you're recognizing an accomplishment. You're celebrating a small win, which leads to creating momentum. We've talked about that in the past, and you're showing gratitude in a way, right? Now the idea is to keep collecting these nuggets. So that whenever you need to get through a tough time, or maybe you're just looking for a pick-me-up, you can go to these little pieces of paper in the jar, stick your hand in there and start reading them, start pulling some of them out and let them serve as reminders that things are great, that things are not all that bad, that you've had some, you know, real fun or real accomplishment. This sort of thing, I think, can really be helpful. For those of us that are pretty hard-charging drivers who get obsessed with like where we're going and just kind of forget about the milestones and the small wins in between. This exercise really helps you appreciate these small wins and it makes you feel more accomplished and, and it lets you express some gratitude. And as a result, it makes you happier. So I share this today because I think it's something we could all be doing or a version of it. And I'm excited. Again, I don't love to share things that I'm not doing myself, but I'm putting it out there as almost a sense of accountability because I think my family personally could really benefit from this. And I want all of us in my family to fill out these little slips of paper whenever we'd like. It doesn't have to be daily. Ideally, I love us all to accomplish something daily, but you know, at a minimum, maybe it's weekly. And pretty quickly between 4 of us in my family, adding, you know, say a couple a week, you know, you're going to look up and you're going to have 30, 50, 100, 200, 500. Imagine how cool it's going to be when we have 1,000 little slips of paper over the course of a few years of these little accomplishments. And I get to stick my hand in there and pull out something that maybe I experienced or my wife experienced, or You know, my daughter who at the time was 11, but is now at that moment 14. I mean, just sounds like a lot of fun. And again, it's going to put a smile, I think, on our faces. So the focusing question for you, do you need to show a little bit more gratitude? Do you need to recognize a few more of the small wins? Do you need to acknowledge the distance that you've come as opposed to always being focused on the the future ahead of, ahead of you? If so, does the Jar of Awesome make sense for you? Does it make sense for your, your business? Maybe you're doing it within your office. Does it make sense for your family? I'll tell you what, I'm going to give it a shot. That's all we have for today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
