The Gratitude Project
Jeremy Adam Smith, Kira M. Newman, Jason Marsh & Dacher Keltner · 2020
The Gratitude Project (2020) is a book by Jeremy Adam Smith, Kira M. Newman, Jason Marsh & Dacher Keltner on Gratitude & Positive Psychology. A science-first anthology from Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center on what gratitude actually does to the brain, body, relationships, workplaces and kids, and where the practice fails or gets misused.
The rare gratitude book that shows you the data, the brain scans, and the limits, then hands you practices that actually survive contact with a hard life.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Gratitude Project pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Robert Emmons defines gratitude as two moves, not one: affirming that something good exists in your life, and recognizing the source of that good lies at least partly outside yourself. Skip the second move and you are just doing optimism.
- Sara Algoe's find-remind-and-bind theory reframes gratitude as a relationship technology: it helps you find good new partners, reminds you of the value of existing ones, and binds you tighter to them. Its function is social, not merely emotional.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- What Gratitude Actually Is
- The Evidence Base: What the Studies Really Found
- Gratitude in the Brain and Body
- Find, Remind, and Bind
- Why We Don't Say It
- Gratitude in Hard Times
- Raising Grateful Kids
- Gratitude at Work and Its Limits
Finish The Gratitude Project tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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