2015-12-14
51 分钟I had to come to terms with the idea that gratitude and ambition can coexist and that you can appreciate what you have now and still want more or other or have ambition to go ahead.
There's this really weird quirk of humanity.
We tend to focus a whole lot more on what's not right than we focus on what's right.
It's called the negativity bias, and it makes us in a persistently more bummed out state than we need to be.
So today's guest, Janice Kaplan, who's also the author of a book called the Gratitude Diaries, decided to try something a little bit different.
We've all heard about gratitude recently, and there's an interesting amount of research around it, but she decided to devote an entire year to a whole bunch of different, let's call them gratitude interventions to see if she could actually literally rewire her brain and her life to just operate on a much happier, more fulfilled level on a day to day basis.
What unfolded was pretty incredible.
And we don't just explore that in today's conversation.
We also explore her extraordinary journey in the media as a newscaster, as a writer, as a producer, as an editor in chief.
And what she's been able to accomplish is pretty extraordinary.
Really excited to dive into the conversation with Janice Kaplan.
I'm Jonathan Fields.
This is good Life project right now, as we sit here, you have had a pretty stunning career, not that it's over, but the list of accomplishments is kind of mind blowing.
And your recent exploration of gratitude on a very personal level is something that I want to get into in a fair amount of detail.
But I want to take a step back in time first.
So you went to school at Yale?
I did.
What did you actually study there?
I was an american studies major, which at the time was a great major.
Tom Wolf, I think, had just gotten the first PhD in american studies at Yale.