Do you practice gratitude in your daily life? How important do you think it is to be thankful for where you are and what you have right now?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I look at the importance of saying “thank you” in our daily lives.

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Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – My upcoming book, Flashes of Elation

00:47 – In this episode…

00:57 – Pre-orders

01:20 – Gratitude

01:37 – Living in the moment

02:03 – You get more of what you put your attention on

02:19 – My personal development journey

02:40 – What is success?

03:31 – You can be happy today

03:54 – Thanking others

05:04 – Practicing gratitude

Transcription:

Hey, in recent episodes, we’ve been looking at my upcoming book, Flashes of Elation. This is a collection of essays on the topic of creativity, covering many different aspects of creating and the things creatives tend to struggle with.

It’s just as relevant to musicians and businesspeople as it is to photographers, painters, and anybody that does any kind of creative work, like writing.

In this episode, I want to look at a section called “Gratitude.” And this is the last section I’ll be looking at in this podcast episodes, but if you enjoyed these, consider pre-ordering the book. Pre-orders close on June 30, 2017, and you’ll only be able to claim the pre-order bonuses up until that point.

After that, you can still buy the book once it’s launched, because that’s not the launch day. You’ll still be able to pick up the book, you just won’t be able to get those bonuses, which I promise do come at a nominal feel.

So, let’s have a look at gratitude.

Gratitude

Gratitude is something I practice every single day. It doesn’t matter what kind of day I’ve had, I always identify things I’m thankful for and take the time to be grateful for them before I turn my lamp off to fall asleep.

As human beings, we have a tendency of thinking that we live in three distinct timelines – past, present, and future. This simply isn’t true. You are always living in the present. Yesterday is a memory, and tomorrow is just another “today”, much like today, in fact.

You might be thinking, “I’ll be grateful when I have something to be grateful for.” It doesn’t work that way, because that time will never come. Again, there’s only now. You can either be grateful now, or not at all.

You can either be grateful now, or not at all.Click To Tweet

I’m not a proponent of the Law of Attraction, but the idea that you get more of what you put your attention on is true. What you focus on grows. When you think about what you’re grateful for, more things will come into your experience that will cause you to be even more grateful.

I’ve read a lot of personal development blog posts, articles, and books. I’ve listened to a lot of self-help audios. I’ve spent years and tens of thousands of dollars on my business training. I’ve tried a lot of so-called “success principles” that haven’t worked for me. But gratitude is something that’s consistently worked for me, especially in the last two years or so. So I made it a habit.

What is success? That depends on who you ask, because everyone has their own vision of success, and everyone’s model is correct. There is no wrong answer. You get to define what your goals are.

You get to define what success means to you.Click To Tweet

But we forget that we can be happy now, not in some distant time when we’ve accomplished everything we’ve set out to do. As far as today is concerned, that time doesn’t even exist. You’re here now. So it seems silly to me that anyone would defer happiness because they think that tomorrow will somehow be different. Tomorrow is nothing more than an idea. Time is relative. We’ve convinced ourselves that it’s a resource, when in reality it’s just a fact of life.

I am certainly not discounting what can be accomplished in a month, a year, 5 years,