Over lunch recently, I exchanged opinions with new friends from California, Oklahoma and Illinois about the greatest inventions of all time. My 
friends and I make our living with accounting and finance cloud-based applications, and we are amazed and excited by the miracles technology provides us every day. Despite our common occupation, none in our group included cloud computing in their list of greatest inventions.
By comparison, consider antibiotics. How many lives do antibiotics save every year? Or microwave ovens, although not life savers, which most agree are a really cool invention. Smartphones don’t rank highly, at least to me, among the greatest inventions of all time, but communicating via FaceTime with my daughter in India as she commutes to work in an auto rickshaw amazes me!
I could continue to add to the list of great inventions, which my friends and I did, until arriving at several conclusions. First, even though we live in different parts of the country, we each claimed to live in the greatest city, in the greatest state, in the greatest country, at the greatest time in human history. In addition, we decided we should spend more time thinking about what we have, as opposed to what we want.
Because of this time of reflection with my friends, I enjoyed both an early Thanksgiving and an excellent reminder that every day should be a day of Thanksgiving. Going forward, I will spend more time thinking about what I have rather than what I want. This simple practice completely changes the way I feel and is truly the greatest way to think!
Happy Thanksgiving from BTerrell Group!
Originally posted on the BTerrell blog in November 2013
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