A Quote? Everyday?

I frequently get asked, “You send out a Quote Of the Day? Everyday? How interesting! Why?”

I think it is time to outline the history of the Gratitude Burst and how it came about. I do not know the actual start date of the Quote of the Day, but something came up at work one day when a manager made a decision and it was absurd; this was back in 1990, I think. I remember the project (AWS), I remember the group, and I remember the people. Anyway, the decision that was made was one of those things that you stop and ask yourself, “How in the world does that decision make any sense?” Some manager decided something that I certainly did not agree with, so I sent out a snippet to my coworkers as “The Quote of the Day.” This little sarcastic habit was very infrequent and was only emailed out to a handful of people in my immediate department.

The rest of the history is a blur! I started to send out a quote regularly. It was a lot less on the sarcasm, and it was based on something I read, or heard, or thought was inspiring. No longer was the email restricted to my coworkers, but I started sending it out to friends over the internet. Back in the early 90s, the internet was still relatively new and not everyone had an email address. Everything was done manually back then. I maintained my own distribution list and would have to add someone by typing in their email address. When someone no longer wanted the Quote, I would get an email and I would have to delete them… again manually.

The Quote of the Day started to become popular. Recipients of the list would forward it on to people whom they thought would enjoy it. After some time, they would get tired of forwarding on the email, so I would get requests to add their friends to the list. Again, another manual process. I remember adding people based on what a friend would say and then getting back a harsh email from the recipient asking to be taken off the list! This was well before spam was an issue and double opt-in lists did not exist!

After a couple of those emails, I started to have people send me an email if they wanted to be added (“If you want your friend to get the quote, please have him/her send me a quote requesting to be placed on the list.”). Again this was a time-consuming effort. But, I enjoyed it. The quotes that I would send out made people smile, laugh, it gave them something to think about, it helped to inspire some people to do things they may not have done. I enjoy the quotes, and I just wanted to share.

Maintaining the list became too much of a burden, so I started to look for some service to help me out. On May 11th, 2000, I signed up at http://lists.topica.com (no longer in existence), and the administrative aspects were automated for me. Topica handled all the requests for subscribing, removing, etc. It was like getting a vacation!

Every day at work, the first thing I would do is send out my Quote of the Day email. Every day, this was still a manual task. Again, I was happy to do it. I actually wrote a computer program once to send out a quote a day and all I had to do was load them up, in bulk, every once in a while. I abandoned that project (or I should say, I never implemented the program) because I wanted to keep it personal. I would say that about 50% of the quotes are sent out with some hidden meaning in them. You can tell the way I am feeling by the quote I send out. Or the quote has a theme for the day. (If you have your old quotes, look at April 15th, or March 13th, Nov. 30th)

With the launch of the new website, http://www.AllAboutGratitude.com, I decided that it was time to bump up the List Management aspect of the list. Whereas Topica is a free service, I then moved it to a service where I was now paying a monthly fee to have the quote list maintained. I am hoping that with the service I am using, Aweber, the list will become more reliable than the free service.

If you have any quotes you would like to share, please send them to me. If you just enjoy receiving them, have fun with them. With that said, I am grateful for those subscribers who are on the list, and for those of you who send me your comments every once in a while. If you are not on the list and would like to become a member, please sign up at http://www.AllAboutGratitude.com

Thanks!

Note: This blog post was update on 2023-03-21.