Posted on May 6, 2010 - by Denis

Let’s Play: The Gratitude Wave

I’m inviting you to play a fun little game with me the idea for which just struck me.

You will need:
- a blog – a simple one, e.g. hosted on blogger.com or wordpress.com, will do
- gratitude
- 5 minutes of time for quietude and writing every time it’s your turn

How to play:
The idea is every day to generate a chain of gratitude journal posts where each links back to the one that inspired it. By also linking to the initial post that started this day’s chain we keep track of how long we’ve managed to make the chain. And the purpose is of course to make the chain as long as possible!

So it goes like this… I will write one post in my “gratitude journal” here on this blog every day with 7 items in it for things I am grateful for today. This is the start post. As soon as you spot that post, read it, let it inspire you to write your own blog entry with 7 things you’re grateful for. These can be related to the items from that post or they can be completely different, it’s up to you, though it could be fun to make them somewhat similar or related Also, put in a link that points to the original start post. Then share the link to your post with your friends and followers, on Facebook, in your forum signature, on twitter and so on and encourage them to grow the chain!
Whoever wants to write a follow-up to your entry will do the very same thing you did, but use your post for inspiration and will include a link to both your post and the original post on my blog (again for tracking purposes, this is not about generating more readers for me, even though it will generate more readers for all of us, too ).

We’ll count all chained entries for 24 hours after the start post has been created and keep a score of how many chain elements we manage to create every day. Of course everyone is allowed to write only one entry per day, at least we’ll count only one per day and person/blog!

I hope I’ve explained that more or less properly! We’ll have to try it and see how it goes and with an example to look at it’ll be pretty self-explanatory

Why this makes sense:
OK, besides being fun (at least in my imagination, thus far ) when done this way, a gratitude journal also provides the benefit of you putting yourself in an “attitude of gratitude” which is hugely important if you want to be happy in life. It’s a ridiculously simply exercise and maybe that’s why it works so well.

Soooo…. Who’s in?

Advanced Tips:
- if your blog also serves as a way or promoting your services etc, you can avoid cluttering your RSS feed with entries for this game by posting these entries in a new category like “Gratitude Journal” and then using something like “Advanced Category Excluder” (for Wordpress) to exclude that category from your regular feed. Some themes and blogging tools also allow you to choose entries of which categories will show up where in your blog, so you can tweak that, too, to avoid messing with your regular readers. Although being grateful is always a great thing, but anyway
- If the above doesn’t work for you, simply create a new blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com and join the game using that one. Make sure you link there to your FB account or regular blog or so, so that we know who’s playing It’ll be more fun like that.
- when posting the link to your twitter, use the hashtag #GratitudeWave so we can easily find all entries