Olina Qian

During my twelve hours flight from San Francisco to Beijing, I listened to Mark Juliano’s Entrepreneur and business podcast he taught in Carnegie Mellon University. I listened to it a while ago, but I felt it might interest to go over it again and see what I am missing here.

The 4th course is about building a team. Basically he listed out what function everyone has in a company. H also gave out some tips about how to dealing with people. One interesting example he brought up was show sincere appreciation.

He mentioned there is a lady used to work in his company who is very tough. So he paid extra attention to her to found out what she really wanted. It was interesting that the most important thing to that lady was not money, not title or anything else. What she really cared is appreciation when she did things right. After Mark found out that secret, he started to praise her when he saw her do things right. He showed his sincere appreciation to everything she did for him. And it’s amazing to see how she changed her attitude in work place and transformed to be a happier employee.

This story made me thought. I’ve ever heard a quote says: In everyone’s deepest heart, he is craving for sincere appreciation. According to statistics, 70% of the divorce is because of lack of appreciation from their spouse and 80% of employee resign because of lack of appreciation, especially from his/her direct boss. It shows how important appreciation is.

However in our daily life, we like to show our appreciation to strangers when they do a little favor to us, like opening doors for us or something else. But when it comes to close friends and spouse, we like to take everything for granted. We sometimes forget to say, sometimes lazy to say, lots of times we even think, we are so close already; we don’t need to say those vanity words anymore, which is so wrong.

One friend ever told me that there are two types of people in the world. One type is activated by trust (mostly male), the other type is activated by love and support(mostly female). (I found it is so true. Maybe that’s the reason Male and Female’s attitudes are very different. Because our source is different.)

So come back to love and support, what’s love and support truly means and how to show your love and support to the one you care? I guess appreciation is a key element we’ve learned today! Show your love, show your care, and show your gratitude to everything others have done for you. You can use your smile, your words or a thank you card to do so! The format doesn’t matter. What matters most is using your heart when you do so!

I encourage you to try this secret formula for one week to the one you care and maybe you can come back give me some feedback on how it goes. Some sweet things will happen, I guarantee you! 

Me? I am going to see my parent in four hours. Once I see them, I am going to give them a big hug and tell them how appreciate I am to them since they brought me to this beautiful word!