5-Bullet Grateful Friday

In early July 2015 I received an email from Tim Ferriss about his new project called “5-Bullet Friday”. I had been reading Tim’s blog and listened to his podcasts for a while by then, so got intrigued by this new venture. I loved the concept instantly: a clean, crisp, straight to the point list of 5 things that he found, experienced or pondered during the week, including favorite albums, gizmos, gadgets, articles. Tim called it “a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the week-end”. As the weeks rolled in I managed to pick out a ton of really interesting ideas to try out in my own life.

One of the things that I always wanted to do is to make more pauses in my life. I work for Google in our Dublin office in Ireland, and things sometimes (often?) get moving very fast, thus as the weeks fly by I tend to forget to just stop and reflect on how well or poorly I have done.

Taking some inspiration from Tim Ferris, in September 2015 I launched my own weekly newsletter (which I cheekily named “5-Bullet Grateful Friday”) in order to keep a regular summary of the things that made me happy, grounded, focused, content, and track the moments of my life that I felt especially grateful for. Every Friday afternoon I sat down and reflected on my last week for 15–20 mins. During that time I created a very short list of the top 5 bulleted points that had the biggest effect on my previous 7 days as I went about trying to have a meaningful, encompassing and rewarding life. I then sent that email to my team (10–12 people) to somewhat liberate these thoughts and observations from my head and make them public.

I sent those “5-Bullet Grateful Friday” posts to my team for the entire year, every one of those 52 Fridays in a row, without a fail. The team loved it, and when I asked for feedback I got back things like “These are inspiration for me as I only get the time to remember how my week went when I read yours”, or “I appreciate it because I get to know my manager as a person outside work, I really like the way you mix work-related and personal matters to be grateful” or “I could pick-up two very useful things from your weekly posts: firstly, consistency in your daily/weekly activities, and secondly, appreciation for little things in life that are usually the biggest. This is definitely something that I am also trying to focus/implement in my own life more & more” or “I can’t help but think about wonderful things that happened to me during the week while I am reading yours”.

In order to not saturate my team for longer than a year with this content, I now stopped sending my posts internally within our team. I am currently researching the opportunity to publish that 52 posts strong collection as a book (please let me know if you have some good idea on where to start).

As those weekly posts have had a massively positive impact on my personal well-being I want to continue creating them and sharing them. I now want to take these weekly “5-Bullet Grateful Friday” posts to a wider audience to see if someone else would find them useful as well. With that, here it goes.

Public Post 01:

Week of October 29th — November 04th 2016

1. Joe Rogan’s podcast with that maverick Dutch guy called Wim Hof was absolutely incredible. But now I probably have listened to 4 (or even 5?) podcasts with Wim Hof (across various shows) and every time I feel like saying: “What the heck was that about?!” What a character this guy is. I feel more pumped than ever to keep taking those cold showers and going into a cold morning Irish Sea than I have ever been before. For your passionate explanations about the value of cold water I am so grateful to you Wim Hof!
2. Last week I conducted a semi annual performance review with everyone on the team. We looked at the work done by everyone on the team during Q2/Q3 2016. I was very impressed with how focused and objective everyone was during our review sessions. I also was delighted to see how well as a team we celebrated a wonderful occasion of promotions of Salma and Dominik with tasty cakes and books from an amazing cafe called Happy Pear in Greystones. For your excellent day-to-day focus, drive, performance and always putting the team’s success first, I am very grateful to you team!
3. One of our team managers on the team in Tokyo (Satoru Matsushita) decided to leave Google after > 12 years here. To mark such an occasion I asked Marcel on my team to purchase a book with some stunning pictures of Ireland’s landscapes, which we sent over to Satoru as a thank you note from the two of us. For your friendship, help and support throughout the years I am very grateful to you Satoru!
4. Arsenal’s win 3:2 away at Ludogorets and especially the third goal (yes, that one scored by Ozil) was indeed the occasion to savour. And both Timofei and I couldn’t stop jumping on a couch at the final whistle. I had to watch Ozil’s goal like 15 times because I could hardly believe what he did. To have that kind of composure at that moment in the game is simply stunning. For your skill and ability to perform so well under pressure, I am very grateful to you Ozil!
5. During the week I had a pleasure to attend a Talks@Google event here in our Google Ireland office with Tim Shieff (YT video of what he can do). Tim talked in-depth about how much emphasis he put into staying well hydrated at all times, how to checks the quality of water he drinks, etc. I also tweeted at him, and he was kind enough to reply. For your passionate talk about the healing powers of water I am very grateful to you Tim!

Thank you for reading the first public post of “5-Bullet Grateful Friday”. You are awesome!

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