Chad Silverstein delivers a short motivational monologue about gratitude and humility. Using hospital and illness anecdotes, he argues that many essential gifts (eyes, limbs, breathing) are taken for granted and urges daily gratitude practices—experiential exercises (blindfold, breath awareness) and a disciplined written gratitude list with accountability—to combat pride and cultivate humility.
Chapters
I always find it absolutely amazing how the most important things in our life are given to us for free. One of my favorite taglines is everything with a price tag is replaceable. You know, we're given things, our eyes, our legs, our hands, our brains, our ability to swallow. We take these things for granted just because we could do them every single day. And we don't think about it, but as soon as it's taken away from us, you realize, you realize just how small we are, how beholding we are to pretty much everything that we don't have control over. And it's, it could be a real wake up call. And it shouldn't have to take something hard or something to lose in order to feel that way. And so I'm going to challenge you to do a couple things. One, think about what could stop you in your tracks. Think about a scenario that you saw happen in your life and don't wait for another one to happen. For you to practice gratitude. Meaning, you know, I recently was in a hospital and I saw every single room. I walked by, someone had a trach in their throat and it woke me up. It woke me up. Or one time when I was really sick and I had a problem as my stomach. And I remember thinking, I'm never going to eat that ever again. You can't wait until you can feel healthy again. So don't. My, my challenge to you is not to wait for something to wake you up and sear you. It's to think about it and start practicing gratitude now. And to realize that you have so much. You know, people talk about they want to be happy. Well, there's a way that you can become happy, and that is to realize again what most people have always told us, which is you're happy with what you have, you're happy with. You know, you don't chase happiness. What you have, it's your lot in life and it's looking within and it's true. And all you have to do is do something to yourself to remind you. Blindfold yourself for 20 minutes in your house, walk around your house, then take off the blindfold and see how happy you are that you have your eyes back. You know, hold your, hold your head under the water and not be able to breathe. After 30 seconds, pick up and take that first breath and realize how grateful you are to be able to breathe the way you, the way we just take for granted every single day. And realizing that that exercise is something we should be doing every single day to never take for granted the things that we're given that can make you happy, that can make you feel a certain way versus pity parties and acting like you're a victim to things every single day. And so practicing gratitude is one way to combat the pride and to build your humility. Humility is just. It's a hard thing to practice. How do you practice it? And gratitude is one that you can actually do. So my challenge is to write out the things you're grateful for. Try to write a long list, try to make it a discipline. I did this once where I did it with a friend. We held each other accountable and we would write for a couple minutes every day. And our goal was to keep going. How many days can we go where we can't repeat what we've already said that we're grateful for? And you'd be surprised. After about a week of listing everything in your life and every one in your life, it's hard to start coming up with things that you're grateful for. But you start to have to realize that you're going to be grateful for the ground you walk on, you know, error, you know, the food that you just take for granted coming from other countries. And it starts to, like, thin out. And you realize there's so much to be grateful for because you can look at your writing and see all these things that you're right now. So however you do it to practice gratitude, build it into your. In your way of being so that you can practice being humble and knowing that we're this. We're this big compared to the big, big picture and know that we have a lot to be grateful for.
