In Honor of Mother’s Day – Showing Appreciation and Gratitude

In my last post I spoke about Harvey Mackay’s classic networking book DIG YOUR WELL BEFORE YOU’RE THIRSTY. One recommendation of his I always try to do – if I see an article that might interest someone or an article about that person I send it off to the person.

When my May-June 2008 issue of the University of Pennsylvania magazine The Pennsylvania Gazette arrived in my mailbox, I read some of the articles, including the one on actor Kal Penn teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania. Near the end of the article Penn praises a specific professor of his when he was a student at UCLA. It was a lovely tribute and I thought it unlikely the professor, who I know, would see the article.

I went online to the Gazette’s website and emailed the article to the professor. A couple of days later this is the email response I got:

Phyllis, thanks. That was very nice of you to send this to me. I thoroughly appreciated it, and our kids were exceptionally pleased. Without you, I would never have seen it. Steve

This is a wonderful example of showing appreciation and gratitude when someone does something nice for you. Obviously, if I ever see something else about him, I’ll be happy to send that to him also. On the other hand, if I hadn’t heard back from him, I’d be much less likely to ever send him anything again.

The moral of this story? Besides taking Mackay’s advice on sending people articles they might find of interest (and now with email it’s so much easier than when Mackay wrote the book), be sure to always thank people for thinking of you and doing nice little things for you. A good saying to live by: A little bit of thank you means a lot (especially to your mother).

college applications, jobs,
internships, manners