Appreciation: The Final Key
Mastering the Art of Loving What You Have—While Building What You Want
“Why don’t you tell me what you don’t like?”
This line, delivered by my wife Hyeyeon years ago and repeated recently with the same smiling eye-roll, is famous in our household. It was in response to yet another of my spontaneous declarations of appreciation: for the way the flowers in the living room caught the morning light, or for the elegance of how our habits fit together, or how the whole arc of our lives was unfolding with such deliberate joy.
Her point wasn’t annoyance; it was efficiency. If I only told her what I didn’t like, she could safely assume I liked everything else and be spared the running commentary. (Though, of course, she enjoys it more than she admits.) But that line stood out to me at the time—not because it challenged my habit of appreciation, but because I hadn’t heard it in a while, and it made me reflect on how uncommon that habit really is. It reminded me that what I do so often and naturally, most people never think to do at all.
A Shared Evolution
When I later told her that I was writing this essay—and using that very quote to kickstart a reflection on appreciation—she gave me one of those mock-scandalized "are you freakin’ kidding me?" kind of looks and said, "I think that all the time; I just don't say it out loud." But for all her feigned exasperation, she admitted she does appreciate that I do this. She never wanted to marry a man who kept his inner world to himself.
And in truth, she too has come to share more in this practice. She often acknowledges how much she has grown over the years in developing not just this habit but many other ways of being more, as she puts it, "Zen." She refers to her old self as "Mrs. Dark Side." But now, she takes real joy in the rhythms of her life—quiet mornings at home with Eva, the freedom to cook and manage our space with care, the pleasure of teaching when her students arrive. She rarely gets angry—with students, with me, with anyone—or at least can hold her expression of it. It’s been an evolution we’ve made together.
The Habit of Appreciation
Appreciation is not a mood. It is not gratitude in the vague, obligatory sense. It is a habit of focus—a cultivated practice of directing attention toward values as they exist, in the moment.
It is a disciplined perception, not an emotional reaction.
Noticing What’s Yours
I don’t mean this abstractly. I mean the concrete act of noticing how the arrangement of a room pleases you. How the colors you chose for your wall bring calm. How the structure of your daily routine keeps your mind free. These are not sentimental indulgences—they are the rational acknowledgments of earned joy.
A Practiced Skill
When I heard Alex Epstein discuss "cultivating appreciation" on his podcast years ago, I recognized the value immediately. He described it as a habit he was working to build. I remember thinking, I already do this—a lot.
It wasn’t a boast. It was the sudden awareness that this wasn’t just a trait of mine. It was a skill I had developed. And that realization brought clarity to something deeper: that appreciation includes not only what is before us in the moment, but how far we’ve come to be here—how much of life has improved, both through our own efforts and through the accelerating progress around us.
I sometimes tell my students how, years ago, I would spend more than an hour on my off day just to make photocopies for the next week’s classes. Now I post PDFs online, and my students annotate them directly on their tablets. Or I think of how, for roughly the same work I did ten years ago, I now get back so much more—not because my job changed, but because the tools, systems, and world around me got better. My car is better. My workflow is better. Our access to food, music, conversation—better.
When we sit down for dinner, we can dim the lights from our phones, select a playlist from a speaker we both control, and enjoy the ambiance we curated on purpose. All this while appreciating a meal we prepared together, and a clean kitchen we cleared together beforehand. That is not what dinner looked like a decade ago. And I don’t take it for granted. I say it out loud. I name it. Because it’s not small—it’s exactly what we worked for.
Appreciation as the Culmination of Objective Optimism
Appreciation is not where Objective Optimism begins—it’s where it arrives. It’s the final key not only to living rationally and purposefully, but to actually feeling the happiness you’ve earned.
It comes after you’ve looked at reality with clear eyes, chosen what’s worth building on, and committed to a direction that reflects your values. Appreciation is the posture of a man who is not just surviving, but succeeding on his own terms.
OO is a method: it means identifying the full context of your life, focusing on what is constructive, and acting to achieve optimal results given reality. Appreciation, then, is the internal reward of that external achievement. It is the conscious acknowledgment: This is good. And I made it so.
This is not to deny hardship. It is to recognize value despite hardship—or better, through it. Appreciation doesn’t arise from ignoring the bad. It arises from building the good and noticing it when it arrives.
(—Appreciating this? Keep getting more.)
The "Positive Present"
We need this phrase because the default orientation for many people is toward the negative present—the faults, the friction, the imperfections, the grievances. Or toward a negative future—worry, risk, fear of change.
But perhaps more insidious is what I call the "positive future"—the imagined someday, the eternal "I’ll be happy when…"
This projection feels motivational, but it steals your life from you. It tempts you to outsource happiness to a moment that never arrives.
Happiness is not just the consequence of success—it’s the experience of success.
And that experience depends on awareness. You can’t enjoy what you don’t notice. Even earned wealth, health, or love will fail to produce joy if your attention is always elsewhere—on what’s lacking now, or what might arrive someday. If you are always focused on the positive future, you train yourself to defer joy, not live it.
So while I’ve often said that self-esteem is the foundation of happiness, appreciation is what makes that happiness conscious. It is the final key—the act that turns success into joy, that makes a well-lived life not just visible but emotionally real.
The future deserves your attention—just enough to excite you and keep you moving. But the present is where you live. So live in it positively.
What You Choose, You Ought to Like
Here’s a radical idea: If you’ve chosen something, like it.
I mean this literally. You chose your partner, your work, your home, your routines. What does it say about you if you chronically resent your own decisions? If you are to be an integrated being, your values and your experiences should line up.
Of course, this doesn’t mean everything you chose came tailor-made to your preferences. It takes effort. You shape your experience by leaning into the parts you love and gradually refining the parts you don’t. This is what it means to "work at a marriage," for instance. You notice what’s good in each other, you cultivate it, you protect it. And where things fall short, you don’t abandon ship—you gently shape, adapt, and improve together.
Owning Where You Are
But choice alone isn’t enough. You must also learn to love the conditions that persist—those you’ve shaped and those you continue to shape. You may not have designed every detail of your environment—your job, your city, your home may carry some constraints—but you can still choose to love where you are. Not passively, but actively: by identifying what you like, enhancing it, and minimizing what detracts.
It’s a bit like that old saying—sometimes attributed to a song—“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Not as resignation, but as intentional engagement. You chose to be here, now make it yours. Love your life by making it lovable.
That doesn’t mean settling. It means seeing. You don’t have to pretend something is perfect—you have to look for the aspects that reflect your intent. This is how you validate your agency.
And if something you’ve chosen truly falls short? Then appreciation becomes the guide to reform. You seek what’s worthy of liking and build more of it.
I always find a way to love the one (the conditions of my present life) I’m with.
The Courage to Appreciate
There is a reason most people do not live this way.
Cynicism has cultural cachet. Pessimism can masquerade as depth. But those who sneer at the joyful do so not because they see too much, but because they understand too little.
To appreciate your life out loud is an act of courage. It is to risk being seen as naive, unserious, maybe even arrogant. But appreciation is none of those things. It is evidence of integration. It is the confidence of someone who knows what he has built, and loves it without apology.
Appreciation is Contagious
When you express real joy, it rarely stays confined to you. Even those who roll their eyes at your exuberance often feel the pull of it. The cynic may scoff, but he rarely forgets the person who lives with real delight. Somewhere under the sarcasm is usually a kind of respect—an envy not of what you have, but of your ability to see it clearly and value it openly.
And for those who are not cynical, your appreciation does even more. It affirms their own joy. It gives them permission to live more fully, to express what they love, to celebrate without qualification. This is the ripple effect of joy well-named: it cultivates more life in others.
I’ve had students who, early in the semester, seemed almost embarrassed by my enthusiasm—like it was uncool to love things that much out loud. But by the end of the course, some of them come up and say it: that my way of teaching helped them appreciate their own lives more. A few mention seeing how good they’ve got it relative to their parents or grandparents. Others say they’ve stopped dreading their long commutes or stacked schedules, and have started using those times to reflect, listen to music, or simply observe the world with more curiosity and calm. Some even describe habits they’ve adopted—writing down what they enjoy, expressing more gratitude, or simply pausing to notice beauty in the ordinary. They don’t frame it as copying—but I recognize the resonance of what I’ve shared.
The Echo in Others
And with friends, I often see the same: small ways of living that we’ve modeled become their own, sometimes with a word of thanks, sometimes without even realizing the influence. A friend might start setting their dinner table with more intention—nicer dishes, better lighting, a shared bottle of wine—after joining us for a meal and feeling the difference it makes.
These are not grand transformations, but they are real shifts. And they begin with appreciation.
The Practice: Naming the Good
Hyeyeon wasn’t wrong. It would be faster if I just told her what I didn’t like. But that would rob us of something essential: the shared pleasure of clarity. Of seeing what we’ve built. Of putting names to values.
I talk to her about our health, our diet, our systems of managing the home. About how we’ve aged well, how our minds have sharpened, how our family has evolved. We name the good. We notice it deliberately.
This is what I invite you to do.
Life is Good. See It. Say It.
This week, take five minutes a day to name things you like—things you chose, things you built, things you shaped. Say them out loud. Write them down. Tell someone you love.
Make appreciation your discipline. Not because life is easy. But because the good is real.
This is the final key—awareness made active, values made visible, joy made conscious. And if you want to live fully, you must learn to see it.
And to say it.
Every day.
(—Goodness deserves attention. If this helped you notice it—there’s more where this came from.)
An important reminder, Matt! This reminds me of a point in an essay David Kelley wrote called "Choosing Life." The entire essay is worth reading, but in Section D on achievement and experience, he addresses your key point about the importance of attending to your present experience, so that you truly enjoy your life and don't just run from achievement to achievement:
https://www.atlassociety.org/post/choosing-life