Hello, and welcome to my news conference! Please, have a seat. It’s very kind of you to come on a holiday weekend. Everyone ready to begin? Great.
Today, I am officially announcing my 2024 New Year’s Resolution: this year, I want to do One Nice Thing Daily.
Here are the rules I have decided on:
• It has to be a nice thing that will positively impact someone else’s life.
• I have to plan the nice thing ahead of time, and record it being done on a calendar that will contain only nice things.
• I will keep you all updated on the status of the project through the social media platform X, which used to be called Twitter, Instagram, and perhaps with an end-of-year article in this very newspaper if the bosses let me.
It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while now. I think that 2024, which will be an election year with great negativity and annoyance for all, is the right time to follow through with the plan.
I will now take questions from the assembled media I have imagined for the purposes of this column.
Wait, you mean to say you weren’t already doing one nice thing daily?
Frankly, I was not.
I’m nice enough, I suppose. I’ll hold doors open for people, and I tip 20% or more like a normal person, and I only swear at people when I’m playing against them in sports. I buy gifts for people at the appropriate holidays and birthdays. I donate extra clothes to charity when it’s convenient to do so. I’m generally good to my family and friends. Et cetera.
But the truth is that I previously made little effort daily towards doing specific nice actions, actual distinct times when my true and absolute focus was on someone else’s wellbeing.
So I’m trying to change that.
There’s also some research that shows that making the effort — and even simply the act of counting kindnesses — can make a positive impact. In a Japanese study involving two groups, one with 175 undergrad students and one with 119 adult women, both groups’ subjective happiness “increased simply by counting one’s own acts of kindness for one week.” What if I did it for one year?
A meta-analysis of 27 different studies with a total of 4,045 participants also showed that kind acts improve well being by a “small-to-medium” amount.
Doesn’t telling people about the nice things you’re doing strike you as egotistical?
Imaginary reporter, you raise a fair point. True saints act behind the scenes, simply doing kind actions because they’re the right thing to do.
However, as previously discussed, that plan hasn’t worked for me thus far. In general, I appear to be motivated by the glory of success and the fear of disappointing others’ belief in me.
Posting the One Nice Thing Daily then has two goals: first, to show others the nice things I’m doing to raise my social status, you know, like what most social media is for. Second, it’s to force me to actually stick to the New Year’s resolution in order to avoid general boos and tsk tsks from the general public.
Andy, doesn’t your plan sound like another campaign?
Yes, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox joined the Semnani Family Foundation, Zions Bank, and others in starting the “One Kind Act A Day” campaign on April 12, 2022. We even wrote a story about it. Then, a year later, the Governor proclaimed April 12, 2023 as “One Kind Act A Day Day.”
Before about two weeks ago, I thought that doing an explicit generous action every day was an idea that my brain spawned naturally. I acknowledge now that the most likely scenario is that I heard about it on an April 12, or in the advertising for the campaign that Khosrow Semnani puts in his mall at Trolley Square, and my brain simply repeated it later.
Still, the One Nice Thing Daily campaign differs from the One Kind Act A Day campaign in several respects. First, the biggest difference is that One Nice Thing Daily has not been championed by Cox, the Semnanis, Zions Bank, Gail Miller, three Utah universities, Crumbl Cookies, the city of Vineyard, and the Osmonds. The One Nice Thing Daily campaign is its own project unsullied by ties to the rich and the powerful. (I have not asked for endorsement from The Tribune on this.)
Second, the One Nice Thing Daily campaign starts on Jan. 1, not April 12. No habits have ever been started on any April 12s. I consider this a key advantage.
Third, our name has fewer words.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ten-year-old Chase Hansen and his father John walk with Viliami Taufalele, right, after approaching him in downtown Salt Lake City and offering to buy him a meal in exchange for a little conversation on Monday, Dec. 16, 2019. Chase started an organization at the age of 6 called Project Empathy. Father and son spend time with unsheltered people in an effort to connect on a personal level.
What kind of nice things are you going to do?
There are so many nice things I can do.
I think the most frequent nice thing categories I’m going to be focused on are using my time, expertise, or platform to help others. Time is pretty simple: I can find ways to donate my time by volunteering at a local community center. My expertise is limited, but I wonder if I could help interested future journalism students with their writing, or present at classes. My social media or Tribune platform could help a small business or a charitable project under the right circumstances.
Part of me is going to be tempted to give away a lot of gifts or donations to accomplish one nice thing daily. That approach, though, is going to be prohibitively expensive for me with my relatively meager salary and savings, so it should limit itself.
Also: I want to write a lot of cards and letters to people I appreciate, but I haven’t had the chance to tell them before.
I have an idea for a nice thing you could do?
Please let me know. Email me at alarsen@sltrib.com, or message me on X or Instagram. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everyone, obviously, but your creativity in this matter as I fill 366 days full of nice things is appreciated.
No more questions? Well, thank you for attending our event today.
May your coming year be full of nice things, too.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com
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