Thank you culture

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 11:00:00 GMT

A lot of things reminded me lately of some of my resolutions. Interaction with other people is often about the tone, intention and about courtesy and gratitude. Gratitude and friendlyness is the salt in relationships with people, even with those that you barely know.

One coffee	5 €
One coffee please	2,50 €
Good morning, one coffee please	1,50 €

Some times I see things that catch me completely off guard. Probably the most effect on my use of the german (and english) language had a random photo on the internet that's well described in this article (and that I'm mimicking to the right). Since I saw this, I'm training myself to add a "Please", "Thank you", "Good afternoon" or whatever is the current language's expression for these terms, to as many sentences as possible. And Yes, those are the first words that I try to learn in every language. A smile also helps a lot. But I'm still a "grateful person in training" - quite often I'm skipping the explicit statement inadvertently.

At Liferay's recent developer conference I had the honor to open and close the conference - and guess what I totally forgot when I hasted to close it (we were running late and it was a long day)... I am still not fully recovered from missing to publicly thank those that did the most work and enabled me (and all others) to have a great event.

What actually triggered this article is another vivid memory of the same event (and several related events before): Multiple people approached me and expressed their gratitude for my help with random forum- and stackoverflow-posts. Needless to say that I didn't recognize them from the tiny avatars used on those sites, but it feels really good if that otherwise anonymous work is well recognized. To those who did: Thank you for noticing, and thanks for letting me know.

As you expect, these are not the only stories, but this is as far as I'd like to go back in this article. If I ever forgot to explicitly thank you: I'm sorry and hope it won't happen again.

And here's the action item for you: Express gratitude, always and especially where it might not even be expected. And I'm promising to do the same. Watch out for the results - if you want to improve the world, this is one of the easiest steps you can take.

Thank you for reading until the end.

groundedgratitude

Thank you culture