Many people choose to dwell on their failures. This leads to unnecessary worrying, regret, shame, and stress.
Morris Pratt
I can see it in the looking back, how this daily practice of the discipline of gratitude is the way to daily practice the delight of God ...
Ann Voskamp

This being Thanksgiving week, I was tempted to write an article about the psychological benefits of gratitude. I waited for the temptation to pass. While I waited, I wrote this article.

I did a little research on the psychological benefits of gratitude. A nice article about what that research found is here in Psychology Today. However, I decided not to write about it. Although I discuss a lot of psychology, my focus is on competitive skills. The emotion of gratitude plays a role in that process, but mostly in topics that I have recently covered, such as the psychology of tit-for-tat, and the opposite of gratitude, negativity. This article about how we get infinite value from finite resources is a good reason for gratitude, both to our Creator and the creativity of our fellow humans. However, I was curious, so I looked further.

Sun Tzu’s Viewpoint

I searched through The Art of War to see if Sun Tzu ever mentioned gratitude. I found exactly one use of the Chinese symbol for “thank.” It was in the verse whose advice was a warning against opponents coming to us to express their gratitude. Sun Tzu’s warning was to expect that they are planning something, something unpleasant. He distrusted such words.

Of course, in competitive contests, Sun Tzu always distrusted words unless confirmed by actions. Although he understood words are needed to gather information and communicate, he saw them as slippery things, shaped by people’s motivation. This has become my opinion as well. We don’t tell the truth. Even when we think we are telling the truth, we are often wrong. We must test words against actions, even our own words. Do we believe what we say? If so, we must show it in our actions. This is especially true about words of gratitude. If we are grateful to someone, it is better if we demonstrate it through action rather than our words alone. However, thank-you cards are also nice .

Cooking a big meal is a good demonstration of gratitude, but helping with preparation before and cleaning up after is also good. Not picking fights with family members at the table is a good demonstration of gratitude. Sadly, my wife and I now live apart from all our relatives. We called our various, far-flung family members yesterday, an action demonstrating our gratitude for having them in our lives. This is something I personally am very bad at doing.

In looking through The Art of War for a quote about gratitude, it soon became clear that I was barking up the wrong tree. Or would have been if I were a dog and books were trees. Gratitude is a backward-looking emotion. The Art of War is a forward-looking book. Sun Tzu looks backward for one reason: to learn lessons from past mistakes. His focus is relentlessly on the future. The past is how we got into our current situation. The future is what we need to do about that situation now. This focus is always on reaching our goals and improving our position in the minds of others. While we certainly can be grateful for the progress we have made, we are never all that we can become. Positions are a path. We are always on a journey. We always have to find new places to step forward.

Regret or Gratitude

Some of us are habitually forward-looking. This is not always a positive thing. At over seventy years old, my biggest worry is that I will not live long enough to accomplish all the things that I look forward to. Another downside of this is that I have a very poor memory. I spend too little time thinking about the past. Fortunately, my wife is my memory. She is better at remembering and considering the past. She has learned better from the past than I have. When I am rushing forward rashly, she whispers warnings in my ear, reminding me of past mistakes. Yes, I say. You are right. I had forgotten about that.

However, there are two ways of looking backward: with gratitude and regret. My wife and I found each other after both experiencing problems in our first marriages. Having been very happily matched now for almost forty years, we cannot help but look back in gratitude at the painful mistakes that led us to find each other. Or, as Rascal Flats says in their great song:

This much I know is true
That God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you

However, some people are trapped into only looking back with regret. The cliche is the high-school football hero that never again regains that same sense of acclaim. However, it is not only past success that can sour a person on the future but past failures as well. I know people in my generation who wasted the last several decades of their lives looking back at their failures, failed marriages, failed jobs, failed opportunities, and crying over them. Of course, since their focus has been on the past rather than the future, their present is not that pretty. They have just drifted along for decades, going nowhere and getting there. How much different could their lives have been with a guiding star, a mission for the future?

Emotion is what gives us the power to act. Since we react emotionally to our pasts, those emotions act to create our future. Regret and gratitude are both emotions, but they also generate other emotions that guide our actions. Regret generates fear, the cortisol paths in our brains that inhibit action. Regret gets us stuck in a rut. Gratitude generates dopamine, the positive circuitry that encourages us to explore new challenges. (See this article for more on these topics.) Gratitude moves us forward. Gratitude not only makes us happier with our lives as they are now, but that same gratitude helps us form better lives in the future.

Conclusions

I really didn’t want to write an article about gratitude on Thanksgiving. It is so expected. I prefer to surprise, but once I started writing, this is what happened. It was an accident. It shouldn’t happen again. But it did surprise me.

Practical Strategy Based on Sun Tzu's Art of War

Gratitude or Regret