Hero (21 page)

If you instill yourself with a grateful heart from the beginning of your journey, and you maintain your gratitude along the way, you will make your journey that much easier, and any difficulties will be reduced dramatically. Without gratitude, you pass up the opportunity to have the Universe plot and plan and provide the right people and the exact circumstances you need to help make your dream come true in the most magical way. Instead, you’re going to have a heck of a rocky ride, and in addition, you miss out on the blissful feeling that comes with a grateful heart.

MASTIN KIPP

What’s so great about gratitude is that it gets you outside of yourself. You focus on what you have, you focus on blessings, you focus on other people, and that’s ultimately where fulfillment comes from. When you’re grateful you’re not focusing on you. It stops the misery of me.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

The reverse is true as well. If you dwell on the negative, the problems, and the issues, you spiral down and down and just make yourself even more tense, upset, and unhappy.

MASTIN KIPP

Gratitude is essential for fulfillment. I know plenty of people who are "successful" but not grateful, and I would not want their lives.

PETER FOYO

I believe gratitude is a state of mind that has to be constantly maintained. I don’t believe – I know. I know this for a fact. In any given moment that I haven’t maintained my level of gratitude, I clearly see a difference.

MICHAEL ACTON SMITH

When I’m having a down day or a bad day, if I’m sitting in my bath at the end of the day or having a coffee, I go through the things I’m grateful for – my health, my friends, my family. It suddenly lifts your mood. And I think most successful people understand that.

When we were making
The Secret
film, I never got out of bed in the morning until I had done ten to fifteen minutes of gratitude.

PETER FOYO

Even my password on my computer is one that reminds me every day of how grateful and happy I am for all the things that I have.

PETER BURWASH

One of the most important things that I got from my mom was that on Christmas Day, starting when I was five and could write, I could not go outside and play until I wrote thank-you notes to everybody who gave me a present. To this day I still try to handwrite a thank-you note to someone every single day.

LAYNE BEACHLEY

I was surfing in Noosa about a month ago, and the waves were so beautiful and the ocean felt so warm and silky, I felt so nurtured and I was having so much fun that I stopped in my tracks with this amazing sense of gratitude coming from my heart, and I just looked out to sea and thought, “This has been so much fun.” All of a sudden a wave just popped up out of nowhere with no one on either side of me to challenge me for it, and I paddled into it and rode it, and it was the longest and best wave I’ve ever had in my life. At the end I just looked back at the ocean and I said, “Thank you.”

You will never know the power of gratitude to transform your entire life until you have a grateful heart. And those who’ve found gratitude will sing its praises in the hope that everyone will hear.

LIZ MURRAY

After burying my mother I went to my friend’s house, and I sat down in his living room. My friend Bobby started complaining because his mother burned his pork chops that she cooked for dinner. My other friend was complaining about her boss at her job, and my other friend about dropping out of school. I looked at them and I thought of mom and the pine box, and I looked at myself, and I started to realize how lucky we were. Really how blessed. Because we had our health. We were alive. I believe gratitude is nothing more than realizing that every single thing you have you could just as easily not have. And everything came into focus. I saw my wealth, because I was not only alive and healthy and young, but I had these great friends. We weren’t perfect, but we loved each other. There were nights I could sleep on their couches and their floors. I did sleep in the park and the hallway a lot, but I wasn’t going to die. If you think of everybody on the planet and what they go through, my concept of poverty couldn’t even compare to many. I didn’t have a place to live, I didn’t have anything to eat, but I realized my own privilege.

Intuition