Some time ago, John Kralik was having a dark night of the soul:
"I was at a low point in my life. Things weren't going well in my personal and professional life."
Or, as it says in the synopsis of his book:
One recent December, at age 53, John Kralik found his life at a terrible, frightening low: his small law firm was failing; he was struggling through a painful second divorce; he had grown distant from his two older children and was afraid he might lose contact with his young daughter; he was living in a tiny apartment where he froze in the winter and baked in the summer; he was 40 pounds overweight; his girlfriend had just broken up with him; and overall, his dearest life dreams--including hopes of upholding idealistic legal principles and of becoming a judge--seemed to have slipped beyond his reach.
So Altadena resident Kralik took a hike up the Echo Mountain trail on New Years Day, 2008, where he said he got completely lost. While he was trying to find his way back and thinking about his misfortune, he said he had a revelation: "Until I learned to be grateful for the things I already have, I wouldn't get the things I wanted."
Kralik remembered that his grandfather always impressed on him the importance of writing thank-you notes. His law office was losing its lease, and he was stuck with a box of 3x5 cards and envelopes with his return address on them, so he decided to put them to use:
"I came up with that idea of writing 365 notes a year -- I didn't know if it would do any good, but it wouldn't do any harm."
Kralick chronicles his experience in his new book, 365 Thank Yous: The Year A Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life.
And that taught him a lesson about gratitude: "every stage along the way, good things would start happening."
Good things have happened since then: Kralik is now a judge on the Superior Court. And he freely admits that while he didn't quite make his 365-in-one-year goal, he couldn't stop: "I cut myself some slack at various points along the way -- for one thing, I wanted every note to be sincere. I didn't want this to be a mathematical exercise ... I got to the end, and said I'd write a book about it, and that would be about that part of my life, about gratitude. But now they just cry out to be written. I''ve now got almost 700 out now."
HIs notes are simple: three or four sentences on a 3x5 card, although some do get longer.
"Someone had just broken up with me, definitely the hardest one to write -- that was definitely more than three or four sentences. But I went back and tried to remember the good things, the joy we had together ... she wrote me avery similar note. I think it really helped both of us to look back at that experience without bitterness or anger, and see the value in it. But it was a really hard one to write."
Since the book came out, people have expressed their gratitude to him:" The interesting thing is I get more notes than I write now. It makes the mail a lot better, and I didn't even want to look at the mail in those days. Now, in my mailbox, I have beautiful handwritten notes from people, and it's not just people saying thank you for writing the book, although I get those."
Kralik's book isn't just a collection of his thank-you notes, although some are there. He says its the narrative of how making an effort to find gratitude and express it profoundly changed his life, and still does.
Kralik will talk about his book and sign copies tomorrow at 7 PM at Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.
And here's a feature on CBS News on Kralik.
