Welcome back to the Daily Gratitude Minute. This is Scott Colby from Say It With Gratitude. I recently finished a book called the Mr Thank You Project by John Israel. I've mentioned this book a couple times before and it details John's journey of writing five thank you cards a day for an entire year, and I'm blown away that he was so consistent and completed his mission.

And as you could imagine, it sometimes became difficult to think about who he should write the cards to. You know, that's a lot of cards, over a thousand cards to write. So he ended up starting to write some cards to some people he didn't know. And I want to share with you a great example. So John went to.

Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, and I'm actually in Spokane right now. I just gave a keynote presentation this morning, so this reminded me of his story. John's a big Gonzaga basketball fan, and in 2017 they lost in the NCAA tournament in the finals. And as you can imagine, John and all Gonzaga fans were completely sad and depressed about the final result.

So he said the game ended at about 9:00 PM and he still had his five cards to write for that day. But the last thing he wanted to do, especially because he was feeling so low in the moment, was to write these cards. Well, as John was trying to figure out who to write the cards. , he suddenly had an idea.

You see, he thought about the Gonzaga basketball team that year, and yes, they did lose the championship game, but they also went further in the tournament than any other previous time. This was the furthest they had gone in the tournament. . And so in reality, it was a time for celebration, so John flipped his attitude and said, what if we celebrate the year that they had, forget about being depressed, that they lost a championship game?

Let's celebrate and give thanks. To going further than any other Gonzaga team had in history. So he, he ended up writing a thank you note to every single player on the team. He looked up their statistics, what were their best games, and he recalled those best games in his card. He wrote to the coaches and he said, Flipping that attitude changed his mood 180 degrees from one of being sad and depressed and down because of that heartbreaking defeat to now one of joy and celebration on what an incredible season the Gonzaga basketball players had given John and all the other fans.

So, great message on how you can take something negative and just by changing your. Looking for the good. Turn it, turning it in into something positive. I'm Scott Colby with Say It With Gratitude, and this has been the Daily Gratitude minute. Cheers.