Practice Atomic Gratitude Daily
“Being grateful for something and not sharing it is like buying a gift, wrapping it, and never giving it to the person you bought it for.” - Pete Paciorek
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE WEEK
Practice Atomic Gratitude Daily - From The 8 Timeless Laws | Law 6: Perspective, Principle 15.6
THE QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Being grateful for something and not sharing it is like buying a gift, wrapping it, and never giving it to the person you bought it for.” - Pete Paciorek
THE METAPHOR OF THE WEEK
Gratitude is like a pair of new glasses, it’s less about changing your life and more about changing your vision.
It corrects “blurry” vision. When we are stressed or unhappy, our vision becomes blurred by what we lack or what is going wrong. Gratitude acts like a prescription lens, it brings the positives that were already there into sharp, crisp focus.
It filters out distorted views. Negative emotions like envy or resentment act like a smudge on a pair of glasses, distorting how we see others and ourselves. Gratitude wipes the glass clean, allowing us to see people’s intentions and our own progress more accurately.
It doesn’t hide reality, it re-connects you to it. A clear lens doesn’t create a fake world or act as “rose colored glasses” that ignore problems. Instead, it provides the clarity needed to see the resources, strengths, and support systems you have available to deal with those problems.
THE QUESTION OF THE WEEK
Who or what are you grateful for right now and why?
THE STORY OF THE WEEK
In 2023, my department at IMG Academy went through a leadership shift.
We got a new boss - Pete Pachiorek.
I had no idea at the time, but Pete was about to become one of the most important mentors of my career.
Around Thanksgiving.
We were sitting in his office.
The conversation drifted into something about appreciation, recognition, telling people what they meant to you.
And Pete looked at me and said:
“Diamyn, being grateful for something and not sharing it is like buying a gift, wrapping it, and never giving it to the person you bought it for.”
I sat there. Quiet.
I’d heard a lot of leadership quotes in my life.
Most of them roll off and disappear.
This one didn’t.
This one lodged itself in my brain. I left his office and could not stop thinking about it.
Because I realized something hard.
I had so much wrapped gratitude sitting on shelves in my life.
Family I loved and rarely told.
Mentors who had shaped me and rarely heard it.
Friends who had carried me through the hardest seasons of my life and had no idea how often I thought about what they’d done.
Even my own body, my own mind, my own clarity, my own opportunities, all of it sitting there as gifts I’d received but never opened in front of the people who gave them.
And I was about to drive home for Thanksgiving the next week, like I’d done every year, treating one specific Thursday like it was the gratitude day.
That night something clicked.
I thought to myself:
Nothing against Thanksgiving. But shouldn’t every day be a day where we “give thanks” (instead of waiting one time a year)?
The conclusion in my mind was “yes”
Then I went down a research rabbit hole on what gratitude actually does inside the brain.
What I found honestly stunned me...
Practicing gratitude reprograms your Reticular Activating System, the filter inside your brain that decides what you notice. The more often you scan for things to be grateful for, the more your RAS starts surfacing them automatically. Without effort. Without forcing it.
In other words, gratitude isn’t just a feeling. It’s a lens upgrade. The more you practice it, the more your brain becomes a machine that finds the positives that are always in front of you.
So I built a system for myself.
Every morning, the moment I wake up, I write down 1-4 things or people I’m grateful for before my feet hit the floor. Specific. Honest. Out loud sometimes.
Every evening, before I close the day, I do the same. 1 - 4 moments, people, or experiences from that day that I’m grateful for. (The ones I would have missed if I hadn’t paused.)
As soon as I wrote down a person I was grateful for, I’d share it with them before I did anything else. Three years later I have not missed a morning or a night of gratitude.
And the lens I see my life through is unrecognizable from the one I had walking into Pete’s office that day.
THE INSIGHT OF THE WEEK
Your brain is wired to fixate on what’s missing. That’s not a character flaw. That’s biology. The survival brain scans for threats and gaps, not for blessings and abundance. Which means gratitude is not a personality trait. It’s a trained lens. And it gets trained the same way any skill gets trained...daily reps.
Here’s the simple rhythm I’ve used every day since that day in Pete’s office:
Every Morning - Before your feet hit the floor, write 1 - 4 things or people you’re grateful for.
Every Night - Before you close the day, write 1 - 4 moments, people, or experiences from that day that you’re grateful for.
Share it - When you write down a person you’re grateful for, share it with them in the moment before you do anything else (text, call, slack, email, whatever works best). Don’t wait for the right moment. The right moment is now.
THE STANDARD OF THE WEEK
Inside The Winner’s Way, winners don’t wait for Thanksgiving to give thanks.
You train the lens daily. You write it in the morning. You write it at night. You tell the people in your circles what they mean to you while they’re still here to hear it.
That’s the standard. That’s The Winner’s Way.
Who or what are you grateful for right now and why?
I’ll see you back here next Monday.
Diamyn Hall
Founder of The Winner’s Way
Author of The 8 Timeless Laws