Be Like Wonder Woman: Cultivate Gratitude
What Amazing Amazon has to teach us about the power of gratitude.
Welcome to EFFIGIES, a weekly newsletter offering actionable insights from my journey through reading and writing comics, designed to inspire you towards building a better life. To become our best selves, we must burn away who we are today.
What’s Inside:
There are many, many benefits to gratitude, but it’s not always easy to have.
My struggles with expressing gratitude when I was younger.
What we can learn from Wonder Woman about cultivating gratitude.
Recently, I’ve been catching up on the current run of Wonder Woman, and something about Diana’s characterization really stood out. Tom King writes Diana as many things — stoic, loving, honest — but what stood out to me most was her gratitude. These panels from Wonder Woman #5 (2024) capture what I mean:
There's a lot of power in gratitude, and plenty of studies show its many, many benefits. But gratitude was, admittedly, something that didn’t always come easily for me. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate gratitude and, I think, Diana has a lot to teach us.
What is Gratitude?
Before we dive into the how, let’s take a moment to talk about the what.
Gratitude, for some people, can be a bit abstract. I know it was for me, especially when I was younger. What exactly does it mean to be gracious? Is it same thing as being grateful? Growing up, these distinction we’re very clear to me, so this is where some definitions are helpful:
In a sense, all three of these words are kind of the same. The differences are in how they are used in language:
Gratitude is a noun. It’s the quality of being thankful and the readiness to show that appreciation to others. Gratitude is a thing you can have (and cultivate).
Grateful and Gracious, on the other hand, are adjectives. They are ways people can describe you. I like to think of them as the byproducts of gratitude. When you have gratitude, people know you to be grateful and gracious.
Benefits of Gratitude.
Now that we understand gratitude a bit better, let’s talk about why it’s important.
In my experience, gratitude is treated as if it’s a law of the universe. People are supposed to have gratitude. Like gravity, it just…is.
Personally, I’m not sure treating gratitude as a given is the best way to encourage people to have it. It’s a real thing, with concrete benefits, that can be cultivated — so we should treat it as such.
Studies have shown that there are many benefits to having gratitude. Here are a few that stand out:
The idea of getting better sleep, alone, might be enough reason to cultivate more gratitude in your life. But when you stack improved relationships, mental and physical health, self-esteem, and mental resilience, the power of a little gratitude is pretty impressive.
And this is to say nothing of the benefits it imparts onto others. Working backwards from the list above, there are (again, at least) several benefits for the people in your life when you have more gratitude:
Every time you form a new relationship, so does the other person.
When you have more empathy, the people around you feel more understood.
If you struggle with aggression, but decrease it, people in your life feel safer.
The greatest benefit, though, is that gratitude is contagious.
The Good Contagion.
I recently read a story about how the simple act of providing a better environment for gratitude can be transformative.
A camp director put out an empty jar, some paper, and some pencils along with a note encouraging the campers to write thank you notes during meals. After the first meal, he returned to find 20 notes. After the second meal, 40. By the second day of the experiment, campers had produced nearly 200 thank you notes.
It’s pretty incredible how impactful a little encouragement can be.
Gratitude begets gratitude, ad infinitum.
Gratitude Muscles.
Okay, so gratitude is awesome, but how do we get it? This is where we can learn from Diana. In the panel above, Diana tells Cassie (Wonder Girl) that she is grateful.
Simple and obvious right? Maybe not.
I like think of gratitude like a muscle. We all already have it, but it’s something we need to train it up to make it stronger (I definitely did).
When I was younger, my life was difficult. Being the child of two addicts and bouncing around from foster home to group home took a toll on my ability to communicate my feelings. Many, many people have had a hand in raising me, and I always felt immense gratitude for each every person, but I struggled to let them know.
Sometimes it’s hard to say the thing you feel, no matter how strongly you feel it.
Invisible Jet Journaling.
I’ve thought a lot about that struggle since then. I’ve tried to imagine a framework that would have helped me say and show my gratitude better back then.
Sahil Bloom, whom I admire greatly, writes about his 1-1-1 Method for journaling. It’s pretty simple: at the end of each day, you write 1 win, 1 tension, and 1 statement of gratitude from the day in short, simple bullets. This is a genius way to make journaling easy and digestible, especially for people just getting started with journaling.
Riffing on Sahil’s method, I came up with a framework focused specifically on gratitude. And because we’re thematic here at EFFIGIES, and we’re talking about Wonder Woman, I call Invisible Jet Journaling. It’s a little silly, I admit, but there’s a poignancy to framework. Let me explain.
Invisible Jet Journaling is, more or less, built in the same idea of short, simple bullets, but instead of including a win and a tension, it’s three bullets of gratitude.
This is a good strategy if you’re just starting to cultivate gratitude, which can be hard. If you have gratitude bottled up inside of you already, but struggle to express it, this is a way to put in your gratitude reps privately.
This is walking before you run.
This also works if you’re looking to add gratitude to your life. And the good news is, you still net most of the benefits of gratitude this way.
Whether you have gratitude but struggle to express it, or you’re looking to add more to your life, we should all strive to be more like Wonder Woman. Each and every day, ask yourself What are you grateful for? Then put those feelings out into the world, on paper or by telling your loved ones that you appreciate them. It will make your life, and the lives of the people you care about, all the better.
And thank you for being here each week. That means the world to me.
- Frank
I’m Frank Gogol, writer of comics such as Dead End Kids, No Heroine, Unborn, Power Rangers, and more. If this newsletter was interesting / helpful / entertaining…
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After Credit Scene
Speaking of gratitude — like so many other lucky people, I was able to see some of the solar storm / northern lights over the weekend.
I’ve been visiting the Napa Valley very regularly for the most of the last decade. The very first time I visited in 2014, the skies were so clear that the Milky Way was visible to the naked eye. The cosmos is one of the few things in this life that truly leaves me in awe, so I was incredibly grateful for that experience and I never thought it would be topped.
On a whim, my wife and I decided to make the trip up for the weekend and on Friday night. The solar storms were only supposed to be visible in the northern U.S., well-away from California and Napa. And yet:
Sometimes, things just fall into place. I’m grateful.