The Lost Art of Thank-You Notes

“Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other. And despite my love of efficiency, I think that thank-you notes are best done the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper.

There was a young lady who applied to get into the ETC and we were about to turn her down. She had big dreams; she wanted to be a Disney Imagineer. Her grades, her exams and her portfolio were good, but not quite good enough, given how selective the ETC could afford to be. Before we put her into the ‘no’ pile, I decided to page through her file one more time. As I did, I noticed a handwritten thank-you note had been slipped between the other pages.

The note hadn’t been sent to me, my co-director Don Marinelli, or any other faculty member. Instead, she had mailed it to a non-faculty support staffer who had helped her with arrangements when she came to visit. This staff member held no sway over her application, so this was not a suck-up note. It was just a few words of thanks to somebody who, unbeknownst to her, happened to toss her note to him into her application folder. Weeks later, I came upon it.

Having unexpectedly caught her thanking someone just because it was the nice thing to do, I paused to reflect on this. She had written her note by hand. I liked that. ‘This tells me more than anything else in her file,’ I said to Don. I read through her materials again. I thought about her. Impressed by her note, I decided she was worth taking a chance on, and Don agreed.

She came to the ETC, got her master’s degree, and is now a Disney Imagineer.”

-Randy Pausch
The Last Lecture

Some of life's greatest lessons can be from the most unlikely places...

“It so happens that his home is situated in a grove of trees. Very early one morning, unable to sleep, he arose and sat by the window. He became interested in watching a bird emerge from his night’s sleep. He noticed that a bird sleeps with his head under his wing, the feathers pulled all around himself. When the bird awakened, he pulled his bill out from under his feathers, took a sleepy look around, stretched one leg to its full length, meanwhile stretching the wing over the leg until it spread out like a fan. He pulled the leg and wing back and then repeated the same process with the other leg and wing, whereupon he put his head down in his feathers again for a delicious little catnap (only in this case a bird nap), then the head came out again. This time the bird looked around eagerly, threw his head back, gave his wings and legs two more big stretches, then he sent up a song, a thrilling, melodic song of praise to the day, wherewith he hopped down off the limb, got himself a drink of cold water, and started looking for food.

My high-strung friend said to himself, ‘If that’s the way the birds get up, sort of slow and easy like, why wouldn’t it be a good method for me to start the day that way?’ He actually went through the same performance, even singing, and noticed that the song was an especially beneficial factor, that it was a releasing mechanism.

‘I can’t sing,’ he chuckled, ‘but I practiced sitting quietly in a chair and singing. Mostly I sang hymns and happy songs. Imagine me singing, but I did. My wife thought I was bereft of my senses. The only thing I had on the bird was that I did a little praying, too; then, like the bird, I felt like some food, and I wanted a good breakfast – bacon and eggs. And I took my time eating it. After that I went to work in a released frame of mind. It surely did start me off for the day minus the tension, and it helped me go through the day in a peaceful and relaxed manner.’”

 - Norman Vincent Peale
   The Power of Positive Thinking

Quote of the Semester

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

- Unknown

How to save a nation:

"'The charisma of that man! The leadership of Mandela! He took my brother's arm, and he did not let it go.'


Did Mandela have any flaws? Sisulu knew him better than anyone. His answer was that his old friend had a tendency to trust people too much, to take their good intentions too quickly at face value. 'He develops too much confidence in a person sometimes,' he said. 'When he trusts a person, he goes all out.' But then Sisulu thought for a moment about what he had said and added, 'But perhaps it is not a failing...Because the truth is that he has not let us down on account of that confidence he has in people.'


Mandela's weakness was his greatest strength. He succeeded because he chose to see good in people who ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have judged to have been beyond redemption. If the United Nations deemed apartheid to be a crime against humanity, then what greater criminals were there than apartheid's minister of justice, apartheid's chief of intelligence, apartheid's top military commander, apartheid's head of state? Yet Mandela zeroed in on that hidden kernel where their better angels lurked and drew out the goodness that is inside all people. Not only Coetsee, Barnard, Viljoen, and P.W. Botha, but apartheid's ignorant henchmen - the prison guards, Badenhorst, Reinders - and its heedless accomplices - Pienaar, Wiese, Luyt. By appealing to and eliciting what was best in them, and in every single white South African watching the rugby game that day, he offered them the priceless gift of making them feel like better people, in some cases transforming them into heroes.


His secret weapon was that he assumed not only that he would like the people he met; he assumed also that they would like him. That vast self-confidence of his coupled with that frank confidence he had in others made for a combination that was as irresistible as it was disarming.


It was a weapon so powerful that it brought about a new kind of revolution. Instead of eliminating the enemy and starting from zero, the enemy was incorporated into a new order deliberately built on the foundations of the old. Conceiving of his revolution not primarily as the destruction of the apartheid but, more enduringly, as the unification and reconciliation of all South Africans, Mandela broke the historical mold."

- John Carlin
  Playing the Enemy

Need a job??

"In his bestselling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell cites a classic 1974 study by sociologist Mark Granovetter that surveyed how a group of men in Newton, Massachusetts, found their current job. The study appropriately titled 'Getting a Job,' has become a seminal work in its field, and its findings have been confirmed over and over again.

Granovetter discovered that 56% of those surveyed found their current job through a personal connection. Only 19% used what we consider traditional job-searching routes, like newspaper job listings and executive recruiters. Roughly 10 percent applied directly to an employer and obtained the job.

My point? Personal contacts are the key to opening doors - not such a revolutionary idea. What is surprising however, is that of those personal connections that reaped dividends for those in the study, only 17% saw their personal contact often - as much as they would if they were good friends - and 55% saw their contact only occasionally. And get this, 28% barely met with their contact at all.

In other words, it's not necessarily strong contacts, like family and close friends, that prove the most powerful; to the contrary, often the most important people in our network are those who are acquaintances."

-Keith Ferrazzi

A cold shower can do more than wake you up...

According to a recent study in Medical Hypotheses cold showers alleviate the symptoms of, and could even prevent depression. The study authors believe that the blues might be triggered by a lack of physical stressors. Because our skin contains 3 to 10 times more cold receptors than those registering warmth, cool water is the equivalent of mild electroshock therapy. It activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing the brain to release noradrenaline, a chemical with antidepressant effects. The study authors recommend spending two to three minutes in 68-degree water.

Creative Juices

According to Martha Beck we have a lot more potential for creative thoughts in our brains, we just need to know how to unleash it. She explains exactly how to do that in this article. It's interesting and worth reading!

You and Me Together

No Man is an Island

"It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be 'as gods.' We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiences, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another...


Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a memeber of mankind. Every Christian is apart of my own body, because we are members of Christ. What i do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me. But each one of us remains responsible for his own share in the life of the whole body. Charity cannot be what it is supposed to be as long as I do not see that my life represents my own allotment in the life of a whole supernatural organism to which I belong. Only when this truth is absolutely central do other doctrines fit into their proper context. Solitude, humility, self-denial, action and contemplation, the sacraments, the monastic life, the family, war and peace--none of these make sense except in relation to the central reality which is God's love living and acting in those whom He has incorporated in His Christ. Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: 'No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.'"

-Thomas Merton's "No Man Is An Island"