Welcome back to the Daily Gratitude Minute. My name is Scott Colby from Say with Gratitude. I just started reading a book called Mr. Thank You, by John Israel. I've known John for a few years. Mainly online, I guess only online. We've chatted, we've done a Zoom call together. Uh, but he wrote this book a few years ago and I'm surprised that I'm just now reading it.

But it tells of his journey and lessons learned from. Writing five handwritten notes. So he wrote five thank you cards every day for a year. Now, that's incredible to me because I sometimes give myself a challenge of writing one thank you card a day for 30 days, and I struggle. So I'm interested in knowing how he did it and how he kept himself accountable and going.

I know one of the things he did, cuz I'm still at the beginning of the book, but he outlined some rules up front that he must follow and I wanted to share four rules with you. Number one, all notes about must be handwritten so he can't copy and paste an email and send it out to a bunch of people. These need to be handwritten notes.

Number two, every day, five cards must be written and every morning starts at zero. So in other words, he can't save. For the entire week, let's say on Sunday and write 35 cards, he needs to write five notes every single day. Rule three, a maximum of three cards count per individual. So in other words, he can't write 365 cards to his wife.

He could only write to his wife or any one individual three times throughout the year. So he has to come up with a lot of different people to write notes to. And number four, this is really interest. if he writes less than five thank you cards in a day, he needs to donate $1,000 to charity. So imagine such a big kind of penalty, kind of, I mean, you're donating to charity, but it is a penalty in that it's a thousand bucks out of your pocket any day he forgets to write or doesn't write five handwritten notes that's gonna keep him accountable.

When he first put together rule four, he was going to donate a hundred dollars to. If he wrote less than five notes in a day, and his business coach at the time said, I don't think that's a big enough penalty. And he asked him, Would you have donated a hundred, 200 or 200 bucks to charity anyway this year?

And John said, Yes. He said, We need to make that rule even more strict. And they came up with donating a thousand dollars to charity for any day that. misses his five thank you notes. Incredibly powerful tool to keep yourself accountable. So I'm just at the beginning stages of this book. I can't wait to dig into it.

It's again, it's Mr. Thank You by John Israel. I'll do another gratitude minute, um, once I finish the book and share with you my big takeaways. If you've read it, would love to hear from you. You can always send me a DM on Instagram over at Scott Colby dot. I'm Scott Colby with Sat With Gratitude and this has been your daily gratitude minute.

Cheers.