Sharing the Savor
The Greatest Thing Happened To Me
…just the other morning. Because of some scheduling changes, my Middle Daughter and I were doing our coding course at 7am. We’ve just finished the PHP section of the course, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, rest assured it doesn’t mean a whole lot more to me at 7am in the morning.
Both of us were tired and grumpy because we had followed along on what seemed to be a relatively simple project (here, take a look ) but we kept getting errors. We had gone through the code with fine teeth, looked through comments, searched Stack Overflow (a coding resource) and yet the errors kept appearing…and when they disappeared, it was only because we’d broken some other part of the code. Frustrating.
We finished our allotted time (two hours) somewhat dejected, and went on with our days. At least, I thought we did. I got a call from her around noon, excitedly telling me “Check your email! Check your email!” I did…and there was a message there with the subject “I AM WINNER”:
This is a test. I changed the error reporting in our php.ini file because it was set to reporting ALL errors. I set it to only reporting simple running errors and it seemed to fix the problem. We’ll see if this works!
Yes indeedy, it does work! I was winner, too, because I would have never thought to check the php.ini file. And that meant I got to once again sing my little triumphant song to my parents:
MY kids are smarter than YOUR kids, Nyah-Nyah…
It should be noted that my daughters also cook better, dance better, and have cuter babies than me. But this particular story is not actually the subject of this love post.
The Point is Telling the Story
According to Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, as related by Eric Barker for Time, the sharing stories of how “the greatest thing happened” with friends is the “single strongest predictor of enjoyment” according to socio-behavioral research. He recommends:
If you do nothing else on this list, do this one…This method is so powerful you can even do it alone. Ever said to yourself, “She is not going to believe this when I tell her”? You just made yourself happier. Merely thinking about sharing good moments with others gives you a boost.
Yes, of course you shouldn’t brag or boast — it needs to be an authentic desire to share joy, not to one-up the listener. But I like the idea of this kind of daily practice — there’s a section for it in the SELF Journal, in fact, where we put down “wins” for each day. You can bet that my daughter figuring out the code went on my list.
What’s on yours? I genuinely would like to know.
