John KralikBesprekingen

adult nonfiction. As lawyers tend to be, Kralik is pretty long-winded, and the sentiments herein seemed overly saccharine for me. That said, the man does know how to craft a proper thank you note, recognizing that the recipients took some time and trouble to do him a favor and expressing his gratitude in a way that seems sincere. Not easy to do. And yes, experiments have indicated that writing down the things you are thankful for (even to yourself, in a private journal) has significant health/psychological benefits.

I was perusing the Audible app looking for my next audiobook. I noticed this book as the Audible Daily Deal and decided it sounded good enough to give it a shot. In December 2007, Kralik was at the lowest point in his life. He was going through his second divorce. He had a limited relationship with his two adult children and was afraid of losing more time with his young daughter. His girlfriend had also just broken up with him. His law practice was failing and he wasn't sure he was going to be able to meet payroll let alone pay his own bills. He was afraid his ultimate dream of becoming a judge was something he would never achieve.

After receiving a lovely thank you from his ex-girlfriend for a Christmas gift, Kralik wondered if happiness could be achieved by being grateful. He began to imagine himself writing thank you notes as a way to remember to be grateful for the people in his life and the kindnesses he had received. He devised an idea to write 365 thank-you notes. As he began to write notes for gifts received or simple acts of kindness from a barista, or from a fellow lawyer, or to his own family, he noticed a difference in his attitude and the attitude of the people that received his thank you note.

Kralik began to notice some unexpected results in areas including finances, friendships, family relationships, and his health. But, also, during this time the economy collapsed and banks failed. Even though not everything was going well for him, he believed he reacted differently because of his thank you project. His message that resounds throughout the whole book is that handwriting a thank you note is special and forces the writer to concentrate more on the task rather than sending an email. It doesn't take much more time to handwrite a note than it does to write an email. The card doesn't have to be fancy or large. A simple note card is perfect for getting a brief message of thanks and gratitude across to someone. Receiving a handwritten card in the mail has a much different effect on the person than opening an email does.

This book is a little dreary for the first several chapters. Kralik has a lot of negative events happening in his life and the reader is given a lot of detail related to the demise of his marriages and business dealings. It made the book a bit difficult to get into. I listened to this book on audio with Kralik as the narrator which made it personal, but he does have a rather monotone voice and during the early chapters, I found the voice and theme of the book extremely dreary and less interesting. As he began the thank you project, the pace picked up.

Really, this book shouldn't be such a shock to most of us. We know that it feels good to be appreciated and told that our efforts made a difference. Yet, it seems to be hard to express that to the people who offer us a kindness. The message of this book offers a reminder that sharing our appreciation for others and their relationship with us is worth us taking the time to write a note of thanks. As Kralik comes to the end of his project, after just fifteen months he is a completely new person and has many positive things to show for it.

I really enjoyed this book. It showed how "an attitude of gratitude" can change one's life. A short read that was well worth the time.

A deceptively simple adjustment of life views so that energy cna be more genuinely felt and expressed.. So glad to have invested myself in this concept!

Very uplifting. It brings to light that when you bring happiness and joy through thanking others for their actions, they are more likely to continue doing what you thanked them for. It makes ones life more focused and gratifying when reflecting back on the actions of others. I have decided to to a "thank you" project of my own although I don't know that I will be writing a note every day as the author did.½

I read the ARC of this book that I received in 2010 as part of the Early Reviewers program here. As behind as I was in reading it, i read the book at precisely the right time. This short read is a MUST for anyone who's feeling a little beat up by life or anyone who has forgotten that life holds magic and kindness. The author speaks of his quest writing 365 thank yous and while sometimes it's a little "woe is me" even that is acknowledged and quickly turned back to gratitude.

A quick read (once i got down to it), while not a prescription for how to change your life around, it is one man's story of how his did. At the end of the book, however, he gives you tips on writing thank yous should you want to try the experiment yourself. And having done it myself, I can say, the practice of forcing yourself to find the good in people and things and situations definitely changes your outlook and therefore your life.

an inspirational book on how thankfulness and gratefulness play a huge role in how we live our lives. recommended to everyone. makes me want to go out and write thank you notes to the people i know and love!

Dear Mr. Kralik,

Thank you so much for writing 365 THANK YOUS. Since I was a child, the importance of thank-you notes has been stressed by my family. Your book has taken it up another level, and inspired me to follow your example of expressing gratitude to others for friendship, thoughtfulness, and other non-tangible gifts.

I have difficulty understanding how some other reviewers thought you were writing notes just to manipulate people to get what you wanted. I totally disagree. From a literary standpoint alone, a story needs to have conflict; show change, character growth, or resolution. It also needs to touch the reader in some way. Without these characteristics, there is little reason for the story. Your book succeeded in all these aspects. I also thought it was well written: straight-forward, yet engrossing.

Mr. Kralik, your description of selecting paper; deliberating to find exactly the right words, and the act of inscribing your thoughts by hand -- all that remains with me. In some ways the process felt nearly sacramental -- and I suspect it probably felt like that to you.

I also liked the inclusion of your actual thank-you notes: examples that the reader can follow.

Thank you again, Mr. Kralik. I am, yes, *grateful* you wrote this book. It brought light to my life (and I am so happy gratitude has changed yours).

Warmly,
Sharon

If you haven't heard of this book the premise is simple: typical lawyer is losing his grip on the good life. He is going through a divorce, his company is failing and is about to be evicted, his girlfriend just broke up with him and his seven-year-old daughter has to sleep in his grungy, cramped, falling-apart apartment every time she comes to visit. He's losing touch with friends and family because he has nothing good to say about anything or anyone. He's even gaining weight. Then one day he has an epiphany and this is where I get a little confused. On the back of the book it describes how a thank you note from John's ex-girlfriend inspires him to set out to write 365 thank you letters in a year, one for each day. That's all well and good - to give the girlfriend credit - until you read page 17. On page 17 John is hiking alone on New Years Day when he is inspired by the memory of his grandfather and a story about a silver dollar and the moral of the story amounts to this, if you thank me for the silver dollar I just gave you another silver dollar will come your way. It's that promise of "good things to come" that supposedly prompts John to write all those letters.
Regardless of who inspired John in the first place, the ex or the grandfather, amazing things do start to happen after John writes a few letters. It inspires him to write more and more and more. His life slowly starts to turn around. John's journey to gratitude IS inspiring. He makes so many transformations you are prompted to put pen to paper yourself...just to see what happens.½

Can writing 365 thank you notes change your life? The author certainly thinks so. Facing one of the most difficult years of his life, feeling as if he had very little for which to be thankful, he started writing a thank you note every day. The notes ranged from simple "thank yous" for promises kept to the more "you really touched my life" variety.

Although it's obvious that the author isn't a professional writer, and ignoring the fact that he seems a bit obsessed with the good that will come out of him writing these thank you notes (instead of merely putting the kindness out there, he seems to expect to have some karma-flavored "payback" for writing them in the first place), I can't help but be intrigued with the results of the "experiment." The author acknowledges how pessimistic he was in the beginning, but as he continued to write notes of gratitude, that attitude shifted into something that almost bordered optimism. It just goes to show that the attitude that one adopts when approaching obstacles and difficult circumstances can color how you see things.

I'd recommend this book.½

This little book is an amazing treasure and should not be missed by anyone. I laughed, I cried, I wanted to celebrate...but mostly I closed it after the last page knowing I'd been changed. This is one ebook that I will soon be repurchasing in hardcoer so I can share it. Thank you Mr Kralik for sharing your journey.

I found this book incredibly powerful and postive. If John Kralik's Thank You project doesn't make you turn around and appreciate what you have in life, nothing will.

A very positive, uplifting book that makes you re-think the things in your life. A good thing to pick up and study when you're feeling down or sorry for yourself. It's a really easy read and I would have liked it to be longer½

As the title suggests, 365 Thank Yous is a book about the year a simple act of daily gratitude changed author John Kralik's life for the better. John is a lawyer and the memoir commences in 2007 with his life in tatters; he's divorcing his second wife, his law firm is financially struggling, his children are distant, his health is deteriorating, he's living in a shoe box and doesn't know how to dig himself out of the mess he's in.

After a walk in the mountains on New Year's Day in 2008, he is inspired to be thankful for what he does have and decides to write 365 thank you notes in the coming year. Slowly but surely his life begins to change for the better.

This is an easy and inspiring book to read and anyone needing a pick-me-up will enjoy it. Some of the notes are included, making it easy to flip to any page and begin reading. Thankfully Kralik doesn't claim that thank you notes will save the world, but he did discover that he became a happier and healthier person when he focussed on what he did have rather than what he didn't. He also noticed a change in family members, friends, colleagues, clients, neighbours and others around him when he began to send his thank you notes.

Reading 365 Thank Yous - The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life inspired me to write more thank you notes in the future, and was a gentle reminder to be grateful for what I have.

I found out rather quickly that this book is not particularly well-written. Kralik’s life experiences are dismal, making the initial chapter just another sad memoir. I was tempted to give up on the book early.

But then the story changes. Kralik discovers the power of gratitude and the story shifts. Kralik changes. The people with whom he comes into contact change and benefit from his new attitude of gratitude. And, slowly, his entire life shifts, building friendships, finding a job, and building a strong relationship with each of his children.

Just in reading the book, I found myself more grateful for people in my life, for my job, for my town. I found myself thanking people for things and feeling happier in doing that.

You have to respect a book that initiates positive changes in the reader.

I think what is important to get from this book, is the fact that a little thing can change big things in your life. The author changed the way he looked at things, writing the notes wasn't really what changed him, it was the outlook that the notes helped him to gain.
As far as the style of writing it could have been better. The thoughts were a little jumbled and hard to follow at times, But I think this book could certainly lead people to want to follow his lead, and that could lead to great results.½

A nice reminder that gratitude expressed is a gift we give that gives back. _I do wish the author had developed more stories from his life circumstance½

Thank You John Kralik for a stupendous book! This small volume became a large ‘ah-hah’ moment evoking the memories of my mother asking me if I’d written thank you notes for my Christmas gifts. As I became absorbed with the book, I remembered hearing that one should be grateful for what one already has in one’s life, in order to for new opportunities to take hold.

Kralik’s journey started from hitting his bottom to reaching for the stars within a short time by ‘being grateful’, sending 365 thank you notes in about 14 months. As he wound through his journey he found his life turning around. His family relationships became stronger, his personal relationships better and his business returning to the ‘black’.

This is an inspirational work and I highly recommend it for those who are interested in an uplifting opportunity to add positivity to one’s life. A great read and I have great gratitude!

You might be tempted to think that this book is a sappy self-help memoir. You would be wrong. I found John's voice familiar and compelling. The idea to be grateful for what you have regardless of how little or how much it is can be life changing, as it was for John.

For anyone interested in understanding how small life changes can result in monemental ones, this book is for you.

This is a non-fiction account of how one man turns around his life by resolving to write 365 thank-you notes over the course of a year; as you might expect, this has the effect of making him more satisfied with what he has and leads to greater positivity in the people around him as well. It's a nice quick feel-good story, but doesn't quite rise above that. There's nothing surprising here, and I disagreed in some ways with his perspective on the whole thing. For example, I didn't much like the idea that his inspiration for this project came from a mysterious voice ("Then I heard a voice: 'Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have,' it said, 'you will not receive the things you want.' ... I could not explain this voice, or the words it said, which seemed to have no logical relation to the other thoughts in my head.") rather than conscious reflection about how to improve his life. It also struck me as strange that he was not, in fact, looking for "a new, positive psychological method to delude myself into believing that my life is better than it really is or to cultivate an artificial sense of well-being", but maintains that the project was just "an exercise in average good manners". I'm not sure there is a meaningful distinction between being happy and just believing that we're happy, so I certainly wouldn't reject the latter, and the claim that he was merely exercising good manners just struck me as false coming at the end of a book about how he had improved his life. The conclusion I personally drew from this book--which is admittedly what I had expected going in--is that being grateful for what you have and expressing that gratitude to others will actually increase your level of happiness; it's only incidental that writing thank-you notes in certain circumstances happens to be considered good manners.

Anyway, this is generally a nice positive book with a good message. The story is nothing revolutionary and you don't need to read beyond the subtitle to get the message, but those looking for an uplifting read might want to pick it up anyway.½

The premise of this book sounded good. Learn how to be grateful for the things you have by sending thank you notes to those who do good things. Why didn't this guy know this before? Oh? He did? He just didn't give a crap until his whole life fell apart. Ah, got it now. Sorry but this book was a preachy, self-indulgent exercise in "see how I turned my life around and you can too" garbage. I put it right up there with “Eat, Pray, Love” in that the author is so self-absorbed and irritating that the book they write can only be seen that same way. Can you give a book zero stars?

365 Thank Yous has one major thing going for it: it makes you want to be nicer to the people you love. Gratitude is, of course, always good and so are thank you notes. I appreciated John Kralik’s effort to turn his life around, and his effort to spread kindness is honorable.

Unfortunately one aspect of 365 left me wanting. Truthfully, it is the same problem that I have with most books of this kind. How do you write a self-help memoir without making yourself sound pompous and like a know-it-all?? How do you help people by telling your life story while still painting a true representation of yourself??

365 Thank Yous didn’t come off as pompous (although at times I didn’t like Kralik), and I do think that John Kralik tried t0 represent himself well. So why did it leave me a little “meh”?
I think the answer lies in his delivery. Kralik describes himself at his lowest point, and he explains that writing thank you notes is what turned it around. I found this idea compelling. I, however, found the narrator a little over compensating. Kralik didn’t sell me on himself. I never got to know him, and because he felt like a stranger 365 Thank Yous felt standoffish.

365 Thank Yous did remind me that I should show more gratitude for all of my enormous gifts. I just wish it had taught me this lesson with a little more heart.

I received 365 Thank Yous through the Early Reviewers, and it was the perfect book for where I am in my life. John Kralik's simple message of looking for the positive when things seem their darkest is a message that most people need to hear at some point in their lives. His writing style is simple and sweet, and his stories quite touching. It's obvious he has much to be thankful for, as we all do if we really look closely at the blessings in our lives.

a gem of wisdom, really works, I do it!!!

I was very excited to receive this book as an Early Reviewer and had no idea the impact it could have on a person until I read it.

Funny enough, it was close to Christmas and someone in my office mentioned that she was looking to get it for a gift but it hadn’t been released yet. I was excited to finish and be able to share it with them all.

365 Thanks Yous is the story of a man who is facing rough times in his family and business, searching for something that will make him feel like everything will turn out all right in the end.

The powerful message that comes out of the story is that the simple act of daily gratitude, even for the silly things, can improve your life before you even know it. Being happy and always looking on the bright side can take us from almost losing everything to having it all.

Absolutely loved this quick read and would high recommend and share it with everyone.