Your assignment today: Write a note of gratitude to someone to whom your thanks are overdue. It might be a schoolteacher, a relative, a former colleague or boss, or someone who did you a huge favor.
Frustrated by the vitriol in so much of what we read and hear, I began asking my business students at Stanford for an antidote: Surprise someone with a long overdue email saying thank you. And make it cinematic. Make the recipient laugh and cry.
We’ve all read of the psychic benefits of generosity. Yet not enough people reap them through thank-you notes. Many of my students have been stunned by the reaction to such emails. Teachers and parents, consider asking your charges to send them; they’ll find that you really can make someone’s day.
Here are some excerpts from my students’ notes to help get them started:
To a former commander in Afghanistan: “I remember vividly the first few days of your arrival at Bravo Company. You dragged your desk out of your office and into the company tactical operations center. I saw it as a symbol of your engagement with the men and women under your command.”
To a first-grade English teacher: “When we met, I was just a child from a small village in India, stumbling over words, reverting to Hindi often. Yet you saw potential where I only saw uncertainty. When my parents decided to move to a big city, I faced an entrance test and interview — both in English, a language foreign to me. I remember the late afternoons you stayed back to test me, encourage me and push me forward.”
To a college adviser who drove a student to orientation: “It was an eight-hour round trip for you on a single day, in pouring rain, and you were heavily pregnant. You even ensured I had a ride back the following day.”
To a violin teacher: “I apologize that this note is late, much as I was for most orchestra rehearsals. I wanted to thank you for pretending to believe me when I said I had practiced and for never complaining when I didn’t shower between a basketball game and my lessons. While I should have learned more from you, your routines and patterns taught me a discipline that has shaped every facet of my life.”
To a town mayor: “When I was 12, you responded to my email right away and spent 30 minutes of your Saturday listening to my ideas on how kids could help the environment. You didn’t just listen, you took me seriously. That one conversation gave me the confidence to launch Walk-One-Week, Sow-and-Grow, and everything else that followed.”
I’m struck by how many of the recipients said they had never received emails like this, said they wept and roared and said they needed this as validation for oft-thankless work, or because life had been tough.
Take the college adviser who drove my business student Joselyn Martinez Moreira four hours through the rain from Arlington to Blacksburg, Va., so she wouldn’t miss her orientation at Virginia Tech. “A note like that — this was the first,” said Fatima Posada-Bellaz. “I get thank-yous for help in applying to college. But I had never received such a long, detailed note. I teared up. I showed it to my husband.”
“That note reminded me of why I do what I do, that I’m still doing the right thing.”
Ms. Martinez Moreira is an immigrant from El Salvador who barely spoke English when she arrived and wanted to be the first in her family to attend college and to study engineering at Virginia Tech. Now the school brings her in to give motivational talks to students.
Allen Lieb, who taught violin to Caroline Levy in Manhattan twice a week from when Ms. Levy was age 4 until she graduated high school, said her email came as a big surprise. “And it read exactly like Caroline, in her voice that I remember from all those years.” She was not as serious about the violin as about sports, he recalled, “but she played a full recital. Her family was thrilled.”
And like many of the newly reconnected, “we’ve made a date to see each other in September,” he said.
One student, Yoshimi Muneta Sato, wrote a paean — “A Tale of Love Across Three Generations of an Asian Immigrant Family” — that likened her family to the garden in Veracruz, Mexico, where, as a girl, she harvested vegetables for dinner. “Just as my grandfather’s garden cycled through seasons of planting, growing and harvesting year after year, so too has love in our family evolved, each generation adding their own nourishment to the soil,” she wrote. She gave it to her father, Jiroyoshi Muneta, on her graduation. He cried. He was touched that she recognized her grandparents’ contributions to their family. And she said, “It was one of the first times we communicated like this; it opened the door for me to express my feelings.”
Consider the responses to other such notes: “I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything that made me prouder,” one wrote. Another, in Trumpian caps: “YOU CAN’T IMAGINE HOW HAPPY YOUR EMAIL MADE ME!!!” Another: “One gets older, and messages like this really touch the heart.” And finally: “God bless you!”
I encourage my students to write at least one such note daily. Give it a try.
Glenn Kramon is a former New York Times editor and a lecturer at the Stanford Business School.
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