Golden Rule #29: Be Thankful for the Opportunity.

This one is pretty easy, when things go well and you finish a project triumphantly and you get to hear praise for your creativity and hard work and the check arrives and you have the prospect of more wonderful things in the near future. Yep. It really is.

And then there are times when you take on more than you can possibly do, and you know that even your best effort might not be enough. You’re tired, dirty, hungry, and nobody is paying the least bit of attention to you or your work. Instead of feeling good, you’re feeling lousy, and the refrigerator stops working and the car is making a funny noise and that’s an unexpected bill in your mailbox.

How about the times when you have to change course so suddenly that you don’t get a chance to finish what you started? Those might be the hardest ones of all — there’s no closure, no sense of completion.

To all of those, can you say, gracefully, “thank you for the opportunity?” Even bad experiences teach us important lessons, and those lessons definitely stick!

I absolutely love Teddy Roosevelt’s speech entitled “Citizenship in a  Republic.” In part, he said,

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

You can’t go wrong being thankful. You just can’t. It catches people off guard. Often they aren’t expecting it. They might think you’re going to ignore them, or chew them out, and instead, you thank them. Try it. See what happens.

Copper embodies gratitude. He thanks me for waking up in the morning, for taking him for his two daily walks, for his food, for his treats, for his school sessions, for making sure he has access to fresh flowing water in the bathtub, and for any number of other things. He sometimes shows it in crazy ways — just yesterday I had to bribe him to release a macaroni-and-cheese print sock of Marley’s, for instance. But there is no “cold and timid” with Copper. I know where I stand with him. His gratitude makes my days infinitely better.