So I was speaking with someone today at the Tampa Bay Technologies Center where I am a volunteer and they knew about my Podcast but I never listened to it and this nice lady had to be in her 80s said Michael what's gratitude even mean? I said well you have to listen to my podcast on Tuesday and I will tell you so gosh. This is Tuesday I have to come on with something Welcome to the Daily Grateful I'm Michael crows. Hope you're having a terrific day It's a challenging week for me, but we're getting through it.
We are getting through it big doctor's appointment tomorrow my brother's memorial service on Thursday and Meeting on on Friday with somebody who wants me to do some public speaking I like to do less instead of more at this pain, you know this time of my life, but anyway gratitude Gratitude is the thankful appreciation for for what someone receives whether it's tangible or intangible The word gratitude comes from the Latin word gratia, which means graciousness or gratefulness Some psychologists categorize gratitude in three different types. Let's talk about this. I'm reading this but you know I'm going off script all the time. You know me an effective trait.
What does that even mean? Yeah being grateful can be very effective affective not effective affective and That is true The next thing they say is it's a mood. Yeah being grateful is a mood And it's a good one because when I'm grateful all the crap kind of goes away kind of just disappears off into the abyss When nothing's going right and everything's going wrong what I always do is I always ask myself. What am I grateful for about all of this?
What is this this just big pile of BS giving me to make me grateful? You know that when I spent and I hate you know I hate talking about personal stuff like this, but I spent the last five days of my brother's life basically in his hospital room watching him slowly Go and move on and There was nothing about that. I thought as I would sit there especially when I was there by myself a lot of times you know his sons were there his wife was there but you know we all kind of switched off and I would just sit there saying this is just like the most horrible thing and this is the third time I've gone through that I went through that with my sister in 1999 I went with it through that with my mom in 2005 and now in 2024 I'm going through this with my brother and I'm saying oh why But then I I did what I learned how to do that was my microphone being moved you weren't supposed to hear that I don't edit Anyway, I did what I was taught to do I said what can I be grateful for in this experience in the first thing that came into my brain was all the fun that I Used to have with my brother both as kids but also as adults we had some Ripper or anytime and I'm not talking about debauchery or anything I'm talking about just business things and and family things and and discussions we would have discussions We would have discussions with some of his sons or one or two of his sons at a time where they were asking all kinds of questions You know he has a son who wanted to start a business But he thought he needed you know thirty thousand dollars or something and we told him about a business that we started with nothing well, I mean literally nothing and It's one of the best stories ever My brother was it still in the Navy and he was assigned he was living here because he was assigned to a boat that was here That was run by the Coast Guard But he was working in a naval office there and they had a mimeograph machine And we went down and made a stencil on the memory of a graph machine You know the old memory member from school and smells so weird and we went down there and made a stencil And I bought five thousand sheets of paper for I think it was fifteen dollars at the time This was many years ago and no idea what that would cost today And we ran off and an offer a price and a call to action And we kept it very simple. This was when I had a lawn spring business and we put out you know an offer You know save your lawn that was the offer and then twenty nine dollars and ninety five cents today That would be closer to eighty five dollars by the way, but back down it was twenty nine ninety five up to five thousand square feet It should have been up to four thousand square feet But anyway, we did that and then we rolled them all up to where the only thing that you could see after you rolled it up was save Your lawn put rubber bands on this was in 1985 and then on Friday nights We would go out He would drive and I would drop one of these things in front of on the ground in front of by the way the paper was like a lime Green and we would drop those things and and We built a lawn spring business very quickly doing that five thousand of those things a week going out Yeah, it was a hard work.
Yes, it was hard work But you know when we were consistent we were using a memory graph machine that we got to use for free All we had to do was buy the paper It was kind of cool and you go down there to the office at ten o'clock at night when nobody was there and crank these things out And you by the way, you had to crank them up by hand. It was an old memory graph machine You had to crank it crank it crank it crank it five thousand times But you know, but we and we told it you know his his one son This is how we did it and you saw how big that business got that business got pretty big guys old that business and you know What my brother out of it early because he wanted to go do something else and he got out of the Navy retired from the Navy at that time But we had fun. We had a hell of a time building that business and dealing with people and just enjoying ourselves to know in So yeah, I thought about that when I was in the hospital watching him go What could I be grateful about with this situation and? yeah, and I've got friend who was in the same hospital that I was in ten years ago and He was in really rough shape.
He did what I didn't do and I wish I would have done because when he was in there thinking He was going to die. He sat down and he said what can I be grateful for about this and when he told me When I learned this about him when he said that I got really mad But then I realized my goodness he was right and I told him about it later and he said yeah, and we hugged He's like, you know a really good guy. So he found things to be grateful for as his life was deteriorating in front of him He got better and now he's doing great When everything's are really bad for me. I find what little thing there is to be grateful for and you would be absolutely surprised And how that makes things a little bit better the other thing that they say in this thing is that it's an emotion.
Yeah Some say gratitude can improve mental health and physical health. Yeah, that's true and they suggest journaling I'm not a big journaling Kind of guy, but I do write down every morning three things that I'm grateful for I just write those down and I keep them in my book that I have So now you know what the definition of gratitude is I didn't even get to Miriam Webster's definition I just went with Google's have it's a terrific day. We'll see you tomorrow