January 2026 eBulletin Now Available

Dear Fellows:

Many of you have not heard of Seth Godin, a serial entrepreneur and marketing guru. Godin has written twenty-two worldwide bestsellers and Seth’s Blog has over two billion views.

Consider this recent blog post:

Taken for granted.

It’s an odd term, worth a look.

We don’t notice that the tree we planted a few years ago thrives just a bit more each day. We don’t notice that the mail shows up when it’s supposed to, that our civilization persists in the face of chaos, and that the lights (usually) go on when we flip a switch.

Granted?

What would happen if we paid as much attention to these persistent delights as we pay to the annoying surprises that unfold each day?

The narrative of our time here becomes our lived experience. We’re the directors of this very long cinéma vérité documentary, deciding what gets focused on and what we skip over.

And it turns out that choosing our focus often leads to the plot changing as well.

These are hardly unique ideas. Author Anthon St. Maarten told us that “true gratitude is about the ordinary.” Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said “tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.” And Texas philosopher Willie Nelson proclaimed that “once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.”

Each of us is wired with a survival mechanism known as negativity bias: a human tendency to pay more attention to negative information than positive. While this instinct once helped us avoid danger, modern media exploits that bias (“if it bleeds, it leads”) and social media algorithms further intensify it by amplifying high-arousal emotions like anger and fear. Yielding to negativity bias injects pessimism, cynicism, and maybe even despair into our lives.

But Godin and others remind us of the need to look at the positive things in life, including all those things that we have become so accustomed to that we simply take them for granted.

May 2026 be a year of health and happiness for you and your family. May all of us take time each day to see, hear, and reflect on the “persistent delights” in our life, and give thanks for them. And may that change in focus bring us even more fulfillment than we already enjoy.

John A. Day
President

To read the full eBulletin, click here.