Addicted To Appreciation
A daily practice of noticing and valuing the good in people, things, and circumstances to rewire how you experience life.
Addicted To Appreciation is a daily mindset practice for training yourself to notice and value the good in ordinary things, people, and moments before cognitive biases or stress narratives take over. Timm Chiusano frames appreciation as a disposition rather than a one-off emotion, and explicitly distinguishes it from gratitude: gratitude is transactional (you received something), appreciation is foundational (it layers onto everything you do, even mundane objects like a manhole cover or a light bulb).
The mechanism has three moves. First, on a thing: pause on a mundane object you take for granted and consider its history, design, or effect on your mood. Second, on a person, especially one who annoys you: ask whether you could have lived their entire life better than they have — the honest answer is no, which forces empathy. Third, on a hard circumstance: look for what understanding it teaches you about what change is possible.
The practice compounds. Done consistently, it produces more presence, more energy, less taking-for-granted, and a relational upper hand because you appreciated the other person more than they appreciated you. Chiusano notes the practice is corroborated by Rutgers research showing appreciation is a disposition with eight components, of which gratitude is only one.
- Appreciation is foundational and layers onto your existence, while gratitude is transactional and requires receiving something specific.
- You can train appreciation as a disposition by noticing good qualities before cognitive biases assign meaning to a moment.
- Mundane, omnipresent objects like light bulbs or manhole covers are the easiest training reps because nobody else is competing to value them.
- You cannot honestly claim you would have done better with another person's full set of circumstances, so empathy is the rational default.
- Appreciation is not absolute — the world contains horrible things — but understanding them is the precondition for changing them together.
Chiusano discovered the practice in 2018 on one of the worst days of his corporate career — managing 270 people through pending layoffs — when he noticed himself admiring a manhole cover on the walk home and realized that reflex was a feature, not a bug.