Serious Business vs. “The 30 Day Gratitude Challenge.”

There are marketing companies that emphasize hype and fluff. ABCI is not one of them. The “Law of Attraction” and all of the associated “positive thinking” new age stuff  is all very well and good, but the charlatans have gone WAY over the top with twisting the concept to sell everything from motivational tapes to shampoo. We take a much more practical approach at ABCI.   We are optimists, but we also believe the best “law of attraction” is simply to work our butts off. “I’m a firm believer in luck. And I find that the harder I work, the more luck I have.”   – the quote as has been attributed to Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Goldwyn and Mark Twain – it doesn’t much matter who said it first, but it’s a great explanation of what goes on here. And we expect our vendors and suppliers to do the same.  And they do!   We have been enormously fortunate in finding great people to work with. So when one of our suppliers, a company called SendOutCards, recently started a promotion called the “30 Day Gratitude Challenge,”  we did what any hardworking, serious company would do.  We ignored it. Repeatedly.

But I saw their promotion on my screen for what was probably the seventh time, I had just had a conversation with another subcontractor, a software development managers who is also a great friend, and it hit me. Almost every interaction I’d had with this person in the last two months had been 90 to 100 percent business, and 90 to 100 percent negative.   More specifically, these interactions consisted mostly of me explaining to  him specifically  and in nauseating detail the parts of a website his folks were building for our client that I was not completely satisfied with. Meanwhile, his team was also heroically and successfully installing updates and  defending our other sites against malware attacks on several other client sites.  These occupied only a few seconds of our conversations.  “Great job on that!”  I said. The “Gratitude Challenge” banner caught my eye after such a conversation. I certainly should be doing more to acknowledge the many people who contribute to our success.  And the premise, sending thirty thank you cards in thirty days, made sense.  There are certainly more than thirty people I am grateful for and overdue in letting them know. “But I don’t have time for this sort of thing!”  I told the banner on my monitor. “What was that?” my husband called from the next office. “Nothing.” I told him. But it wasn’t nothing.  I kept thinking about it, and thinking about the people I would send cards to if I were not too smart to fall for such a silly promotion. Of course,  my cynical streak argued that SendOutCards is only doing this because they want to sell more stuff.  Well, we all want to sell more stuff, and there are more harmful or devious ways of doing that. Part of me even tried the argument that by sending paper cards, I’m killing more trees. Oh, please.  Now you’re reaching, Paula.  You waste more trees than that on the three drafts it takes to get an article perfect. And business is all about relationships.   It stands to reason (not fluffy, silly “law of attraction” reasoning either) that taking a few minutes every day to acknowledge one good thing can’t help but improve relationships, as long as it’s sincere (and actually more like long overdue!) I thought about it off and on for another two days, and finally started the 30 Day Gratitude Challenge this week. Posting my cards on Facebook, they may give you some ideas! Learn more about the 30 Day Gratitude Challenge here.}.