My Daily Gratitude Journal in a Box

Goal-Setting Projects: Dream Board & Gratitude Box

These goal-setting projects involve making something, which should appeal to all of you who love to make things. Trashmagination is about more than making things from trash – it is about exploring what increases creativity.

This idea is explored in the book The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study by Pierluigi Serraino, which is about a 1950s creativity study of the top architects of the day. The researchers were trying to understand what causes someone to become a creative genius.

On page 216, it says:

“Creativity is the reassembling of existing knowledge… Creativity involves associative memory working exceptionally well to bring together concepts and ideas routinely thought to be far apart.”

Trashmagination is all about reassembling & bringing together concepts and ideas routinely thought to be far apart.

Dream Board

My Dream Board July 2014
My Dream Board July 2014

Instructions and photos for my Dream Board

I called this my “dream board” but it’s not actually a board where I post dreams. It’s a project to collect all of my favorite things and find patterns. It becomes a tool to inspire new dreams that are in alignment with my values.

Categories of my What Makes Me Happy list:

  • Sources of Passionate Energy
  • Sources of Peaceful Energy
  • Sources of Intellectual Joy
  • Family Life
  • Nature
  • Teachers
  • Public Figures
  • Food
  • Favorite Places
  • Songs

Gratitude Journal in a Box

My Daily Gratitude Journal in a Box
My Daily Gratitude Journal in a Box

The questions I answer are “What am I grateful for?” and “What did I learn today?”

Observations after keeping the journal for a year

For more inspiration, check out this TED Talk with Sarah Trimmer – Start and End Happy. Sarah follows a similar process but without the cards and with a few more questions, which are:

  • Today I am grateful for…
  • Today I helped someone by…
  • Something that made me happy today…
  • Today I learned…
  • Tomorrow I will… (In the future, I will…)


How do I Do Annual Goal Setting?

I learned my annual goal setting project from Leanne Cusumano Roque at Shine Like the Sun.