Empire of Gratitude: The Power of Thank You Notes

It's my freshman year of college and I'm issued up a challenge. Write 1 thank you note a day, everyday, for the entirety of the school year. Was this the greatest lesson in humility I've ever learned? Probably, but to be perfectly honest, I'm not really sure what to call it. Coming up: how a single thank you note, turned into an empire of gratitude...stay tuned.

The challenge was simple, I felt I could easily write a thank you note a day. But lets back up a second. Why was I even doing this? My buddy Cam got me hooked on the idea, he explained his own experiences with thank you notes and the power they seemed to have. It did seem pretty alluring, this idea that I would be documenting my appreciation of the people in my life. Challenge accepted. So I set to work, the first thank you note I wrote was on a standard size, 3 by 5 note card to my roommate Luke. Sometimes I wonder if he still has it. It was incredibly simple, I just thanked him for being a good friend, signed it, then put it on his desk for him to find. From then on, day by day, I wrote a thank you note.

There were rules I set for myself. The number one rule, the very standard, was that I could not be seen giving the thank you note to the designated person. I didn't want this to become some vain, self centered endeavor and I was afraid that if I received the instant gratification from handing someone a thank you note, then that's exactly what this would become. Other rules included: only writing the notes in pen because I wanted to come across genuine and erasers don't really help that cause, only 2 thank you notes per person because I didn't want a crutch and no holiday/birthday notes, because that is sappy as hell. Very soon after my first week of thank you writing it started to dawn on me that this would be much harder than I thought. I was going to have to get creative.

After I burned through all of my closest friends and my family fast enough, I began to write thank yous to people outside those circles. I wrote a thank you note to all of my professors and slipped it under their office doors. One professor I couldn't find so I showed up early to class and slipped it under the locked classroom door. When class started he found it laying on the ground; he bent down, picked it up and put it in his pocket. That was his last year at the university before he retired, I hope that thank you note meant something to him. I know his class meant something to me, it was the single hardest class I have ever taken in college and I tried my hardest because I knew it was his last class ever and I didn't want it to be filled with total duds. The academic community only extends so far, I took 4 classes a semester, that only amounts to 8 thank you notes total (math!).

I wrote a thank you note to two cafeteria workers. Rosetta, a friendly African American woman who had the best friggin' mac and cheese, mac that reminded you of home, made you warm inside because it reminded you that the only time your mom let you watch TV at dinner was when you ate mac and cheese. This made me feel slightly better about eating in a cafeteria. So Rosetta got a thank you. I had another cafeteria worker give it to her. The other was a man everyone referred to as Chef Jeff. Jeff was a spit fire cafe worker. Other than making subtle alcohol references to students, singing loudly to himself and making fart noises, Jeff worked the pizza station. I genuinely enjoyed Chef Jeff's ability to take students outside of their heads while they were walking around the cafe. I literally watched a shy girl run away from the pizza station at full speed because he asked her how her day was going. Hilarious. So Jeff got a note. After placing it on the counter and hurriedly walking away I heard him ask another worker "you think there's money in it?" Success. I even wrote a thank you note to the cafeteria itself by sticking a note card in the suggestion box.

Each note was personalized, there were always at least three sentences expressing heart felt reasons why I was thankful for that person. I wrote a thank you note to the maintenance crew in the residence hall I lived in for keeping the halls clean. I wrote a thank you note to my Resident Assistant because he really worked hard to make a difference on his floor, but we were freshman so we didn't care, but I wanted to show him that I cared, so Sean got one. Musicians I thought were particularly good at the open mic I attended, got one in their guitar case. My step dad, got one on his dresser. Old high school friends, got one in the mail. Food court Subway employee, got one...somehow.

I'll never have a way of knowing if some notes made a difference or not, if my feelings of gratitude were taken seriously or even if some notes got to the correct person. Some people wrote thank you notes back and a couple people from there even started a writing correspondence with me. Some people would tell me they appreciated the notes, others I could see appreciated the note, but we kept it at that. My mom, in pure mother fashion, was concerned as to why I was writing them. In some ways so was I. I know that everything I wrote was genuine, that I meant every word (this was in pen after all), but I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe I was just doing this for myself. I don't want my ever wise hindsight to decide this though and I never could figure it out then. All I know is that I never missed a day, not one, and if that's the case, there had to be something meaningful driving me to do it.

The last thank you note at the end of the year was to Cam, for getting me started. There have been several times in my life that I have desperately wanted to start again, but the challenge does not seem repeatable. I've tried to get others to do it with me, I've tried to give people thank you notes as gifts in hope that they could try it too, I've tried to pick up a pen and a note card and try again, but the momentum is not there. My days of writing thank you notes are over, but the lessons I learned in gratitude and appreciation will continue to stick with me.

And sometimes, very rarely, I run into someone who says they still have one hanging up or stashed away some place

 and that always means the world to me.  

Thanks for Listening,
Kyle