Why You should Be Grateful

“The things you take for granted, someone else is praying for. Be grateful”

Over the last 2 months my girlfriend and I travelled across Asia. We visited Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia.

During our journey, one conversation with one man reminded me of something very important. But before telling you what it’s, let me give you a little bit of context.

After staying 1 month in Thailand, we jetted off to Cambodia. At our arrival in Phnom Penh, we hopped into a cab and headed straight for our Airbnb to drop off our heavy backpacks.

Our taxi driver was nice and very talkative. He talked about his family, his life, his country and shared his vision of the world with us.

At one point he asked us:

“Where are you from?”

So I replied

“France. We’re staying here for a couple of weeks”

Taxi driver: “Oooh France, nice country!”

Me: “Yeah, have you ever been there?”

Taxi driver: [laugh] “Noo it’s too expensive! The airplane ticket and visa are very expensive. If we, Cambodian, want to visit Europe, we need to give a big deposit. Only rich people can travel.”

His answer intrigued me. It made me wonder how much Cambodians make on average each month. After a few research online, I found out that the average income in Cambodia is… $100/month!

In other words if a Cambodian with an average income wants to travel to Europe for a week and decides to save 10% of his income every month to do so, he will have to wait for at least one decade before setting foot on the old continent (and my calculation doesn’t include the deposit that’s required for Cambodians to travel and the inflation).

When you live in USA, Canada and or any other developed countries, you don’t realize that sort of thing.

You just think that in your country you earn an average income.

BUT for billions of people around the world you are actually RICH.

Even if you make $1,500/month, you are still making 15 times more money than 80% of the world population! (source).

Think about it for a moment.

I know that some of you have debts to pay off, live paycheck to paycheck or you probably wish you earned more. I get it! Right now you are not where you want to be financially.

But you can’t deny the fact that you live more comfortably than 80% of humanity.

And I think we should be grateful for that.

Because if you don’t learn to be grateful now, you will always feel miserable even with $2,000,000 in your bank account.

Being grateful is so damn important! So cultivate the habits of being grateful.