The word I stuck on my wall.

Lydia Lori Busler asked me on The Joyful Path podcast what the most important part of joy was. Things, accomplishments, or the journey.

I surprised myself a little by not picking any of them. I said, "the word on my wall", and then I had to explain.

On a piece of paper taped to the wall in front of where I work, I have written one word. Gratitude. It is not a vision board. It is not a motivational quote. It is one word, in marker, stuck to the wall at eye level, where I see it without having to look for it.

That word is doing more for my business than any strategy I have ever written.

Why a word and not a sentence

People who get into habit-stacking and morning routines often build long affirmations, lists, mantras. I have tried those. They do not stick with me. Maybe it is the psychology training, but I have come to believe that the short and the visible beat the long and the ceremonial, every time, in real life.

One word in a room I spend ten hours a day in is going to land harder than a twenty-minute meditation I will skip by Thursday. The word waits for me. I do not have to remember to practise it. I just have to look up.

And gratitude is the one word I kept coming back to, over years of trying different words. Not because I want to look more grateful on LinkedIn. Because the actual emotion, when it is real and not performative, changes the way I see a day.

What gratitude does that nothing else does

Other emotions are reactive. Excitement happens when something happens. Anxiety happens when something might go wrong. Pride happens after a win. Those emotions are all tied to events.

Gratitude is different. Gratitude is a choice you can make with no change in the external world. The coffee is the same coffee. The email is the same email. The client meeting is the same client meeting. All that shifts is the internal frame. "I get to do this today" replaces "I have to do this today". And that four-word swap, done daily, compounds into an entirely different working life.

I am not making that up. I have run two businesses now, one as a marketing agency and the current one as a publishing-and-platform company. The version of me who wrote gratitude on a wall has produced something meaningfully different from the version who did not. More patient. More generous with clients. Slower to complain. Less inclined to chase a deal that does not suit me, because I am not running from scarcity.

The Cornwall context

When I told Lydia about the word, we were already talking about Cornwall, because I had moved down here from London about four years ago. My wife's family lives in the south-west, and we wanted the children closer to them, so we moved. There are beaches ten minutes in almost any direction.

I am not a swimmer. I cannot, in any honest sense, make use of the sea. But the sea is still there, every day, out the window, and the mere fact of its being there, cold and steady, is part of what the gratitude word is pointing at. The move to Cornwall was a decision about what kind of life I wanted to live while I was doing the work. It was a gratitude move, before I had even written the word on the wall.

A lot of entrepreneurs wait for the business to hit some magic number before they make the life change that would make the business worth running. I did it the other way. I made the life move, and the business adapted around it, and the gratitude deepened because the setting of the work was no longer a trade-off but a gift.

What this looks like in practice

If any of this is useful to you, here is the honest short version.

• Pick one word. Not five. Not a sentence. One word that captures the emotional posture you most want to embody at work this year.
• Write it on a physical piece of paper. Not a sticker on your laptop. A real, physical, marker-on-paper note. Bigger than feels comfortable.
• Tape it where you cannot miss it. The wall you face, not the wall you turn toward. It is meant to be in your line of sight all day, not tucked in a corner.
• Do nothing else. No ritual. No morning affirmation. No journal practice. Just the word in the room.
• Notice, over the next month, whether the word starts to catch you mid-thought. It will. That is the whole mechanism.

I know this sounds almost ridiculously simple. That is why it works. Complicated interventions ask you to remember something. A word on the wall does the remembering for you.

My word, for four years now, has been gratitude. It has not changed. It probably will not. And the business has compounded alongside the practice, in ways I would not have predicted when I first wrote it in marker and stuck it up.

If you have not picked a word, pick one this week. Put it up. See what happens.

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From my conversation with Lydia Lori Busler on The Joyful Path podcast. Watch the full episode below.