December 2011
5 posts
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Counting the Blessings of 2011
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
End of year is a fantastic time to count your blessings, and this is exactly the thing I’ve been doing lately. Reflecting back on 2011 these last couples of days made me realize I had no idea how great my year really was. I thought I knew, but I so overlooked some of the things… How could I?
For instance, I understood that I got to meet not one, not two,...
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Gratitude Explained
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
Practice giving thanks regularly and you’ll be amazed at what happens. A lot has been said about the power of gratitude and benefits of grateful attitude, but this quote just sums it all up and really explains the magic behind the idea. It puts it simply, but how powerful and true are these words?
Julia Osovskaya is a thankful spirit who...
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Thankful Person’s Guide to Places to Eat, Shop &...
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
Did you know there were places out there especially fitting for a thankful person? Well, you’re about to find out what they are and where they’re located. Consider it your guide to places where one can eat, shop, go for a walk, play, pray and enjoy the sights thankfully. First on the map is Café Gratitude in San Francisco’s Bay Area. The food and people here are a...
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Gratitude Challenge
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
A few days ago I came across a blog post with a brilliantly put question in it. It truly serves as the greatest reminder of the importance of expressing gratitude, yet it’s so simple, really. I wanted to share it with all of you and here it is:
If you woke up tomorrow with only the things you’d given thanks for today, what would still be in your...
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Choose To Be Thankful
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
I am a big believer in the idea of being the master of your own happiness. And I also believe in the power of words and thoughts. What we say and think shapes how we see this world and creates what we get out of our life experience. And even though you may not be paying much attention to how you express these thoughts of yours, it seems your brain or someone out...
November 2011
7 posts
4 tags
To-Do Item #1: Appreciate
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
I was thinking the other day how much busier I’d been lately, much busier than even just 3 months ago and much busier than I could’ve imagined myself being at this point. I feel like I’m up to everything all at once all of a sudden. But life happens and, mostly, each thing that calls for my time and attention does so because of my own choice.
The...
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Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!
This post embodies the spirit of the Thankfulfor community - and we are so grateful for it. Thank you to everyone who has ever posted on Thankfulfor.com, creating a beautiful stream of thankfulness and gratitude. We wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving!
- The Thankfulfor.com team
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Put Yourself in Life’s Shoes
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.” - Gilbert K. Chesterton
It’s hard to deny that the world can be a very negative place at times, and it’s certainly not helpful when people help this negativity build and prosper. Log in to any social networking platform, check your dashboard and you’ll see...
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5 Reasons to Say “Yes” to Saying “Thank You”
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
There are many reasons why one decides to start their own gratitude journal, be it a physical notebook, a document on your computer, a blog or a helpful smart phone application, and while for some the decision is a no brainer, others can get hesitant. “What exactly is so attractive about this whole gratitude movement? And why should I express my thanks daily, if...
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Small Pleasures
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
A magic little video about all those simple things in life we are sometimes so quick to forget and a beautiful reminder to be thankful for every day we’re given. Enjoy!
Julia Osovskaya is a thankful spirit who believes that positive thinking, optimistic attitude and thankful mindset go a long way. Having completed a personal blog challenge of...
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Benefits of Gratitude
Guest post by Julia Osovskaya
Practicing regular gratitude really works. Skeptics might still be giving me a hard time about it, but having completed a whole year of daily thanksgiving, I know what I am talking about and stand behind it. My thankful efforts proved to be more than worthy – the experience was truly and almost magically life-changing. Among the positive changes I observed...
September 2011
2 posts
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Never Forget
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Summer Gratitude
As the days start to get shorter, let’s be thankful for summer. After all, it’s not over yet! Have you been able to enjoy the summer? What are you thankful for? Post it here: http://thankfulfor.com or in the comments below.
July 2011
2 posts
4 tags
Thankfulfor...Travel
We live in a world where we can easily venture beyond our city borders and explore places far from home. While our modes of travel are something to be grateful for in and of themselves, today I’d like to point out how wonderful it is to discover the similarities and differences when traveling to cities around the world. Many people take summer vacations as an opportunity to travel. If you...
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May 2011
2 posts
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Thankfulfor: Moms
Last year the we pulled some of the wonderful posts from the Thankfulfor.com community and put them in a lovely e-book for all to enjoy. We thought we’d bring it back again - for us, it never gets old.
Thankfulfor Moms
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Thankfulfor: To Mama With Love
We can’t let this day go by without sending a special message out to all the mom’s out there. We also wanted to highlight a special organization that really offers a unique and generous way to show mothers around the world how much you care. The organization is called Epic Change - the program is called To Mama With Love. Here’s a letter from the founder, Stacey Monk:
In the...
April 2011
1 post
The pursuit of happiness | UC Health →
Times change, and today we live in a huge-bandwidth world with learning and growing opportunities unimagined by our ancestors. Still, these two existential questions remain for us as they did for Aristotle: What is happiness, and how do we achieve it?
There is progress to report. Faculty members at UC Davis are leaders in the study of the “science of happiness.” And while happiness research is in...
March 2011
2 posts
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February 2011
2 posts
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January 2011
1 post
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On This Winter Day...
One of our favorite community members who hails from Maine shares how life continues to prosper deep into the snowy winter. We’re thankfulfor such vibrant posts.
December 2010
3 posts
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Revamped Resolutions: Unforgettable and...
It’s a well-known saying that no man is an island, and as part of a community every individual has a role to play. By fulfilling these parts, we enable others to live safe and comfortable lives. Many people use New Year’s Resolutions to improve the self - resolving to lose weight, get rid of debt, to exercise, to spend time with family. These are valid, and I’ve made these...
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Happy Holidays!
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The Gifts We Receive
Whatever is given is a gift—even the most difficult experiences and traumatic events can be seen as Wake-Up calls, and therefore gifts. And the appropriate response to any gift is gratitude. In the depth of our heart, we can turn fear into courageous trust, agitation and confusion into stillness, isolation into a sense of belonging, alienation into love, and irrational reaction into Common...
November 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone.
Wherever you are, whatever Thanksgiving means to you, remember to be grateful.
And as Marcy reminded us in Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving special, it’s a time to be thankful for each other.
Thank you for being here. Have a safe and special Thanksgiving.
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The 2010 Gratitude Index
We’re happy that our growing community at Thankfulfor.com has been flourishing for just over a year now. The daily posts, photos and feedback touch us everyday, so we decided it was time to take a closer look at what we have - and to actually see what our community is most thankful for.
So, we anonymized a percentage of our public posts and analyzed the data - and the results are in! ...
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Tweetsgiving 2010 - Support Change Makers
For the third year in a row, nonprofit Epic Change is focusing on 3 days around Thanksgiving (Nov 23rd, 24th and 25th) to focus people’s gratitude on a specific cause. For the last 2 years, they focused on school children in Tanzania. This year, they have decided to focus on raising money for three “changemakers”. Learn a little bit about them here:
Mama Lucy Kamptoni -...
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Sending Christmas Cheer to Soldiers Overseas
Guest post by Isabella York
We feel the holiday season before we see it. There’s a skip in our step, a hint of joyousness in people’s voices, and just a general cheeriness that is quite infectious. But for those with a loved one serving in the army, Christmas can be a painful time. When these families are struggling to cope, it can be a great comfort to know that generous programs...
October 2010
3 posts
6 tags
Photos, Facebook Like, Links - Try Them Out
Did you happen to notice that there’s something a little more fun and festive in Thankfulfor these days? That’s because we added the ability to upload photos! Try adding some - it makes your journal come to life in a very vivid way.
Also, if you see a post you like in the public stream, just click on the time it was posted and it will take you to a page with that post, the picture...
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Living Life as a Thank You
About a week ago, I was introduced to one of the authors of the recently-released book, Living Life as a Thank You: The Transformative Power of Daily Gratitude. They’ve been spreading the message of gratitude far and wide with their book - which is right up our alley. We talked to co-author Nina Lesowitz about how the book came to be and here’s what she had to say:
While researching our book,...
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Thankful for the In-Between Time
Guest post by Leigh Ann Napier
On Wednesday I was feeling overwhelmed, overtired, and under-rested…as a mom that tends to come with the territory. So when my mom came to visit and asked if she could take our little “angel” home with her for a few days, my hubbie and I eagerly said “Yes”! So she’s off on an adventure at Grandie’s House.
They left Thursday morning around 9 and by 4:30 I was...
September 2010
3 posts
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Have You Read a Good Book Lately?
Guest post by Kim Wierman
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Books, the real paper kind that you can stick in your handbag or throw in with the beach chair are, I fear, becoming replaced with technology. I saw a newscast the other night about the Ramona series of books by Beverly Cleary and how a mother who...
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Never Forget
World Trade Center 9/11 Flag
On display at the McCormick Tribune Foundation Freedom Museum
This morning I sat at an airport restaurant, waiting for a breakfast burrito with no less than five televisions on around me. All of them blared with bright colors and sounds of excitement showing thousands of college football fans getting excited to cheer on their teams as the fall football season...
August 2010
9 posts
3 tags
Thank You
Opportunities are capricious things. You may come out of one with far more than you expected.
When I began my internship with the wonderful folks at Shiny Heart (those responsible for Thankfulfor.com), I was eager to utilize my design skills outside of a classroom and learn about what goes into creating and promoting a website like this one. These goals were more than met, but my internship...
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Why Write a Thank You?
Guest post by Art Decker
Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? As the saying goes, a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world could cause a tsunami an ocean away. The idea is that tiny events can trigger something much larger — tiny events have a ripple effect. It’s like a pebble dropping into a pond. The pebble will produce a tiny ripple, but the ripple expands...
Happiness is...?
How-to guides to finding happiness seem to be the current trend in popular psychology. Look almost anywhere on the Internet and you will find a dozen experts willing to provide lists, formulae, even flowcharts that illuminate the route to happiness. But for anyone (read: “everyone”) struggling to find it, happiness is an often-elusive concept, not an algebra problem with a step-by-step logical...
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It Takes a Village - and PayPal
We have a new zen garden at Thankfulfor! Many thanks to our intern, Tori, for conceptualizing, designing and building this beautiful zen garden, community support page for Thankfulfor. While we are working on products and features that will turn Thankfulfor into a self-supporting site (and some even bigger plans for the future!) we are still small and don’t yet have the scale to truly...
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Back to School
No matter how old I get, there’s still enough of the kid left in me who thinks summer is a magic word and August is the “beginning of the end.” Summer was the Promised Land of no homework, longer days and later bedtimes. Endless opportunities existed in those hours of freedom: entire days spent at my cousin’s horse barn or on the river with my best friend; taking trips to the beach; reading...
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We've Got Profiles... and Pictures... and...
We’ve been working on this for a while now and it’s been so hard for us to know that it was coming, test all the features on our test system, yet not get to share it with everyone. But as of tonight, thanks to our dev team led by Bill, we’ve got some colorful and fun new features!
Profiles: now you can add a photo of yourself, your website and tell us a bit about you. Just go...
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Thankfulfor Check Marks (and the Stuff Inbetween)
Where do you see yourself in ten years? It’s a favorite question of potential employers, college admissions departments and the parents of your significant other, all of whom want to be sure that you’re not a couch-surfing loafer. But no matter how well intentioned your answer may be, sometimes life has other plans.
Ten—even twenty—years ago, I had some lofty goals for myself. Though my list of...
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Thankfulfor You - Moo Cards Are Here!
All cards were designed by our fabulously talented intern, Tori. Aren’t they great?
I was inspired to create something like this when I was at a hotel trying to check in and things were a bit hectic - the person at the counter was so fabulous… I told them so, but also wanted to hand them something a little special to express my gratitude (not just a tip). Now we can hand these...
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International Friendship Day
A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world. ~Lois Wyse
International Friendship Day celebrations take place on the first Sunday of August. The spread and origin of this holiday are not yet well documented. Evidence from social networking sites indicates the holiday may have grown with the spread of the Internet,...
July 2010
7 posts
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Detours Welcome
I’ve never been fond of the Interstate. It quickly gets you where you want to go, but it’s just so boring. The topography might change a little, but a section of the Interstate running through North Carolina is essentially no different than one in Oklahoma: concrete and billboards. And it’s a sure thing you’re not there to appreciate the scenery; traveling at 75 mph, your only goal is to book it...
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Twitter Provides Pulse of the Nation
A team of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University, studying the characteristics and dynamics of Twitter, released this report a couple of days ago. Over 300 million tweets were utilized to infer mood and user location, creating a rich, time lapsed mood map of the US.
From the team’s website:
A number of interesting trends can be observed in the data. First,...
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What Dream Are You Living Right Now?
Image by Tela Chhe
Guest post by Leigh Ann Napier
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” Epicurus
I was standing at my kitchen sink…tidying up for the third time that day…and I looked out the window and what I saw grabbed my heart. I saw what I’ve seen so many times in...
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You Can't Plan Perfect
In Scotland, there is a pre-wedding tradition that involves the startled bride-to-be (and sometimes the groom), her supposed friends and buckets of eggs, feathers and anything slimy out of the refrigerator. The newly Blackened Bride is then escorted around town and, eventually, allowed a bath. I’m sometimes tempted to point out this cute little custom to certain individuals obsessing over their...