Saturday morning. 8:46 AM.
My phone buzzed. I glanced down expecting something that needed my attention — a question, a problem, something to solve.
Instead, it was Dan Goodwin.
Dan runs Provident 1031. He’s sharp, driven, and the kind of leader who walks into a room and quietly raises the standard for everyone in it. He didn’t need to email me that morning. He had his own Saturday, his own list, his own momentum pulling at him.
But he took two minutes to write three sentences to tell me he was blown away — by the website, the vision, what we were building together. That he was all in.Three sentences.
I read them three times.
And for the rest of that day, I had something in my step that no strategy session, no revenue number, no closed deal had put there. It was the simple, staggering feeling of being seen by someone who didn’t have to say a word.
That’s what I want to talk about.
“Gratitude that stays in the notebook doesn’t change anyone’s day — including yours.”
The version of gratitude
we’ve settled for
Many have made gratitude into a habit.
Five minutes in the morning. A journal. An app that reminds you to “reflect.” Three things you’re thankful for before the coffee kicks in — and then you’re off to the races again.
I’m not knocking the practice. But I want you to notice something: that version of gratitude is almost entirely about you. It’s internal. It stays in the notebook. It doesn’t touch anyone else.
The kind of gratitude Dan Goodwin lives. It moves outward. Without an agenda. Without timing. Without a calendar reminder.
He thanks waitresses — genuinely, not performatively. He sends texts people weren’t expecting. He finds the positive frame when everyone else in the room is looking for the exit. He’s not doing gratitude. He’s made of it.
And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that — you know exactly what I mean. There’s a difference between someone who practices gratitude and someone who is it. You can feel the difference instantly.
That’s the version I’m chasing. I’ll be honest — I’m not there yet. But I’m paying attention to the people who are.5
“In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Todd duncan taught me
a lesson on gratitude
Recently, I stopped scrolling while perusing through posts on LinkedIn.
That almost never happens.
It was a post from Todd Duncan (see the post below).
If you don’t know Todd (#ToddDuncan), go look him up after you read this. He’s shaped the careers of more salespeople and leaders than I could count — and for 30+ years, largely without knowing it, he shaped mine.
Ten years ago, Todd heard three words: You have cancer.
Last month, he posted about being 10 years cancer-free.
But it wasn’t the survival story that stopped me. It was how he talked about it.
He wrote about what cancer stripped away — and what it left behind. He talked about losing his wife to breast cancer. In the same post where he was celebrating his own survival, he paused for the families who didn’t get the outcome he did. He held his joy and his grief at the same time, and he didn’t flinch.
He called the photo he posted his “Victory Blessings.” Not because he won, he was careful to say, but because he was given more time.
That phrase sat with me for days.
“Victory blessings”
Todd Duncan
Not “I beat it.” Not “I survived.” But this – he was grateful was given more time. And with that time, he intended to make it count.
I’ve noticed this pattern — and maybe you have too. The people who have faced the hardest things tend to be the most grateful. Not because suffering makes you noble. But because when you’ve lost something real, or come close to it, the noise burns off. What’s left is what actually matters.
Gratitude born in that fire isn’t a morning routine. It’s a scar that healed into something that changed how you see everything.
THE EXCHANGE I ALMOST DIDN’T HAVE
After I read Todd’s post, I replied publicly.I don’t always do that. Most of us don’t. We read something that moves us, we feel it for a moment, and then we scroll. The feeling passes. We move on. The person who wrote it never knows they reached us.
I didn’t want to do that this time.
So I told Todd he’d been a mentor for thirty years. I told him that a friend once said, “Jeff, do you realize you sound just like Todd Duncan?” — and I told him that was one of the greatest compliments I’d ever been paid.
I didn’t know if he’d see it. I wasn’t angling for anything. It was just true, and truth felt like it deserved to be spoken out loud.He replied.
He said I’d made the difference in my own life — that he was just the bridge, and I walked across it.
I wrote back: “That’s the mark of a great mentor, Todd — you made the bridge feel like it was built just for me.”
He said: LOVE LOVE LOVE.
Three words.
And I felt twenty-five again.
Here’s what I learned from that exchange — or maybe remembered: gratitude isn’t a one-way street. When you express it genuinely, without agenda, you don’t just honor the person who helped you. You hand them something they didn’t know they needed. You remind them why they do what they do.
Gratitude isn’t a one-way street.”
Because real gratitude is rare enough that when someone actually feels it — they feel it completely.
Most of the people who have poured into you? They have no idea it landed.
Tell them.
THE Part I can’t leave out
First Thessalonians 5:16-18 says: “Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.”
In all circumstances.
Not when the quarter is strong. Not when the team is firing. Not when the test comes back clean.
All.
I think about that often — especially in the moments when gratitude is the last thing I feel like reaching for. It’s easy to be thankful when things are working. The real discipline, the real test, is whether you can locate something to be grateful for when they aren’t.
That’s not pretending the hard thing isn’t hard. It’s choosing — sometimes stubbornly, sometimes against everything in you — to find the gift inside the difficulty.
Todd Duncan did that. On the page, in public, with honesty about both the joy and the loss. Whether you share my faith or not, that posture is worth studying. It’s not weakness. It’s one of the most demanding things a human being can do.
Here’s what I’m asking you to do
I said at the top of the podcast that by the end of this, you’d stop what you were doing and send someone a message.
I meant it.
Think of one person who showed up for you. A mentor who believed in you before you believed in yourself. A client who stayed when they could have left. A friend who said the thing you needed to hear when you needed to hear it. Someone who built a bridge you’ve been walking across for years.
Write them something.
It doesn’t have to be long. Dan’s email to me was three sentences. Todd’s reply was three words. The length doesn’t matter. The intention does.
Just say: Here’s what you meant to me. Here’s how you showed up. Here’s what I’m grateful for.
Don’t edit it into something polished. Send the imperfect version. Because the imperfect version, sent today, is worth more than the perfect version sitting in your drafts.
People are waiting to hear from you more than you know.
The Real Competitive advantage
Business conversations are full of talk about edges — better systems, sharper strategy, stronger teams, faster execution.
All of that matters. I’m not dismissing it.
But I’ve been around long enough to notice something. The people who build the most durable careers, the most loyal relationships, the most meaningful legacies — they almost always share one thing that never shows up on a dashboard.
They make the people around them feel like they matter.
Dan Goodwin does it all the time. Todd Duncan has spent a career doing it. It’s not soft. It’s not peripheral. It’s the thing that outlasts every tactic, every trend, every market cycle.
Gratitude — real gratitude, the kind that moves outward without an agenda — is a competitive advantage. It’s just one that most people are too busy to use.
I’m working on it.
I’d love to know if you are too.
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