Oprah Winfrey's gratitude journal
A gratitude journal is the simplest reflective practice there is: write down what you are grateful for, in your own words, regularly. Oprah Winfrey kept one daily for about a decade — five things a day — and says plainly that it fell away when her schedule got the better of her.
The prompts Oprah Winfrey worked from
Oprah wrote five things; Steps asks two questions instead. That is our shape, not hers — one about today and one about your life more widely, because the second is what stops the first shrinking to weather and coffee. The questions themselves are ours. The practice is hers, and a great many other people's.
- What are you grateful for today? The day in front of you. Deliberately open, deliberately small-friendly.
- What are you grateful for in life? Wider than today. This is the one that stops the practice becoming a list of nice weather.
A practice, and how it ended
Oprah Winfrey kept a gratitude journal every day for about ten years. Five things, written down. One entry that survives, from October 1996: a run in a slight breeze, cold melon on a bench in the sun, a phone call with a friend about a blind date, a sorbet in a cone, and Maya Angelou ringing up to read her a new poem.
Ordinary things. That is the practice working, not failing.
Then it slipped
She has said plainly what happened next: life got busier and the daily writing fell away.
That is the most useful sentence on this page, and it is why the practice is worth having a system for. People almost never stop journaling because they decided it was worthless. They stop because a Tuesday got in the way, and then another one did.
The two questions
What are you grateful for today? is the easy one, and left alone it shrinks — coffee, weather, a good night’s sleep. All true, all getting smaller.
What are you grateful for in life? is the counterweight. It is wider than a day and it does not renew every morning, so answering it takes actual thought. It is the one people skip and the one doing the work.
The two prompts Steps recommends when you sign up. You can change them any time.
Anyone starting from nothing. It is the most forgiving practice here — two open questions, no technique to learn, and a thin answer is still an answer.
Gratitude journaling turns into performance if you let it — writing what sounds grateful rather than what is true. If you catch yourself composing, the second question is usually the way out. And on a genuinely bad day, forcing it is how people come to resent the practice and stop.
Oprah has described the practice and its ending in her own words, on the record, for years: five things a day beginning in 1996, kept up for about a decade, then slipping as life got busier. One surviving entry from October 1996 lists a run in a breeze, cold melon on a bench, a phone call with a friend, a sorbet, and Maya Angelou ringing to read her a new poem.
What this template is built on
Curated by Tiago Martins · Last updated: · How we write these
