David, George Brooke, the gratitude guy.
Tell me about your vision.
Thank you, Jackson.
My vision is really probably in the overreaching,
overarching term, I guess,
is getting the point of gratitude
and a gratitude mindset and an attitude of gratitude
as many people as possible.
I talk about how gratitude, embracing this mindset,
a gratitude journal, understanding the principles
of focusing on your blessings and abundance
can just really reshape your life.
So the whole vision is about making people
see this as an option.
We live in a world that is so incredibly negative
and all you have to do is turn on the news
and see what's happening across the world
and in our own cities and drug homelessness,
all sorts of things.
And I know it's tough, but I offer this attitude
of gratitude to show people that one of my favorite terms
is gratitude turns what you haven't to enough.
So it's really about exposing enough people to that
to show them that there is another alternative.
And as I tell people, you and only you choose your attitude
and you can get out of bed in the morning
on the left side or the right side,
but you make a decision.
There's nobody that gets in your head
and rewires the blue wire to the red wire
and all that kind of thing, but you decide.
And if you decide to have an attitude of gratitude,
you can choose that and you'll be, as I always say,
happier, healthier, and lighter.
So it's just such a positive experience
and I have all sorts of, and I won't go into the detail now,
but I have all sorts of studies and research
about how gratitude makes you live longer and healthier
physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.
So it's not just talk.
There's a lot of science behind how an attitude of gratitude
can make you live a longer, more healthy life.
Absolutely.
So David, where did the vision come from?
Is this something that you came out of the womb
preaching and teaching about,
or is this something you discovered along the way?
I'd love to hear where it came from.
You bet.
I actually discovered it along the way.
When I was 19 years old,
I was a freshman at the University of Washington
here in Seattle, and I went and did a talk for high school
and I walked back to my car and he said,
I want a motivational talk for 30 minutes.
And I got back in my car and I thought,
that's what I wanna do someday.
I wanna be a motivational speaker.
Well, that was in 1969, so that was many, many years ago
and it wasn't till about 40 years later
that I was managing stores
for Nordstrom and Lowe's Home Improvements.
And I finally quit and said, I'm gonna be the speaker.
And what had happened is having had a lot of traumas
along the way, my father had taken his own life,
my mother died of cancer, my wife passed away
when my sons were young, four and 14.
And so I had a lot of tragedies and a lot of things
that were kind of traumas that needed to be overcome.
And somebody said to me one day,
you need to get a gratitude journal.
And I said, well, what is that?
And I said, well, it's a book you write in every day,
what you're grateful for.
So I got one and I noticed an immediate difference.
And so I thought, that's gonna be my topic.
I'm gonna be in the gratitude.
And at some point decided I'll be that gratitude guy.
And the gratitude journal is kind of the centerpiece
of what I talk about.
And it's so important to write every single day.
I'm so grateful to Jackson for inviting me
to vision pros and so forth.
And there's a little thing in the front of the gratitude
journal that says, if you think about it, it's like a dream.
If you talk about it, it inspires you.
But if you write about it, it empowers you.
So it's that powerful.
And that's really where it came from.
And it just is gone from there.
And I tried to encourage people to get the gratitude journals,
to get the attitude and the mindset
and how much it can make you have
and just focus on a better life.
That's fantastic.
I'm also a big fan of the concept, the belief,
the lifestyle, whatever we want to call it, of gratitude.
We don't understand the value of what we have.
This is something that will definitely
be a huge blessing to people.
Gratitude journals are definitely one of those assets.
I think I was, I don't know, somewhere in my teens,
I might've even been in between years,
when I heard a leader, his name is Henry B. Irene,
and he challenged the audience to keep a record
of three ways they saw God's hand in their life that day.
And that became a kind of a new level of gratitude journal
that I used for a long time.
And I once in a while, you've reminded me of it today.
I appreciate that, because I haven't thought
about that exercise and that capacity in a while.
And there's always things that we can be doing,
be refining, be moving towards to make sure
that we exercise a skillset that
ultimately leads to peace and happiness.
Absolutely, and it's interesting, Jackson,
that one of the things I do in my talks
is I don't do a PowerPoint.
A lot of people, give me your slides.
We don't have any slides.
It's gonna be interactive, it's experiential.
There's lots of exercises and activities.
And I have people write things on cards.
And some people have said, it made me think of this
when you said that, that some people said,
well, just write three things you're grateful for
every single day.
That's great, whatever it is,
long-shares focusing on it and so forth.
And I write usually sentences in my gratitude journal
or sometimes bullet points,
but it's just so powerful in this day and age
of all this high tech and computers.
And I can say into this, send Jackson an email,
it'll type it up.
I mean, there's all those things.
There's nothing like this little instrument called a pen
and this little gratitude journal writing in,
I'm so grateful, just like you have there.
I'm so grateful to Jackson.
In fact, I have a part of mine that says,
the highlight of your day.
So tomorrow morning when I write in the gratitude journal
and it says special occasion,
current event special occasion
so that you don't need a diary,
then I write, which I'm grateful for.
And then I write the highlight of my day.
Well, newsflash, one of my highlights tomorrow
is gonna be Jackson from today.
So you're gonna be in the gratitude journal tomorrow.
I'm just telling you right now,
cause vision pro is this is cool.
That's awesome.
Yeah, but it's-
I might include two more for you to add to that journal
because you unlocked something important
mentioning that pen.
The first time I heard that in a way
that really connected me was John Aserath.
I was at a meeting.
John Aserath is kind of the king
of neuro-linguistic programming in LB.
He's one of those who leads the cause.
And he explained in that class
how when you write the words,
there's a literal current that is traveling
between that and your brain that is,
and as you're choosing to write the letters, right?
There's a lot more effort than if you are actually typing
on the same exact shape key,
everything that you type,
that there's just something magical about the kind.
And I just felt it.
I don't know about the science.
Sure, cool, awesome.
But I don't pretend to be a scientist.
I just know what I felt.
I'm glad you told me that.
I keep talking about that in terms of conviction.
And then later I had the privilege
of being part of the mastery journal launch
for John Lee Dumas, entrepreneur on fire.
Oh, sure.
So when he launched that book, man,
that was so fun to be a part of and learn about and see.
And there's, again, there's really no,
I don't think there's an end to the depths that we could go
in terms of exploring the value of gratitude
and journaling it and how those things can combine
to raise our mind, raise our heart up from
maybe the pains of the world that we sometimes face.
Well, and you know, Jackson,
you just made me think of something,
we talk about dropping some value bombs
on John Lee Dumas and one of his quotes.
But the thing that, another thing that came out of it,
which was, I don't know if I planned this
at least initially, but if I go behind me in my bookshelf,
my gratitude journal lasts about three or four months.
So it's about four per year.
And I get a new one and I put the little dates on them
and so forth and on my bookshelf behind me.
But you're putting this gratitude every day
and it's planting your brain.
And now you said what John Hasaroff said,
that's so cool.
The penwork flows, I'm so glad you said that,
which makes sense.
But there's this other bonus I never thought about
is I thought, wait, I had a tough day back on March
if so and so and so.
Let me go back and see what I wrote on that day.
And it's so instructive to go back and see how I,
in some cases, had to deconstruct the day
and get back to going, I had a hot shower,
I had a roof over my head, I had food in the refrigerator.
I went back to some basics because I'd had a tough day
for some things that had happened.
So you can reference that and go back in time.
And now I must have, I don't know,
70 or 80 journals or something.
They've been doing it for about 10 years.
But it's so neat to go back and look at that.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.