My great-grandmother Masan raised me in a hogan on Big Mountain, and the instruction I think about most often was not about sheep or weather or ceremony. It was about talking.
Speak only what you want built.
That was the whole of it. She did not explain it the way I am about to, because explanation was not how anything came to me out there. She simply corrected me when I said something careless, in the same tone she used when I set a tool down in the wrong place, and after enough corrections a boy works out that the two things are the same kind of error.
What she meant, I understand now, is that a sentence is not a report on the world. It is an act in it. Every sentence is a brick, and you are building either way, whether or not you have looked at the plan lately.
What it is not
It is not positive thinking, and I want to be careful about that, because the two get confused constantly and the confusion does real damage. Positive thinking asks you to say a cheerful thing you do not believe, which your body registers as a lie and files accordingly. Masan never asked anyone to pretend. Our people are blunt, and a family that herds sheep in that country cannot afford a soft relationship with facts.
The instruction was narrower and harder. Say the true thing, and then notice that among the true things available to you there are several, and you are choosing. The weather is bad and the well is far and the boy is slow and the dog is good and the water is sweet when you reach it. All of that is true on the same morning. Which of them you say out loud, repeatedly, in front of the young ones, is not a neutral act, because the ones you say are the ones that get built.
She was not managing my mood. She was managing what got constructed in a house where a child was listening.
The morning, before your feet touch the floor
The other half of it came earlier in the day. We rose before the sun, and the first thing out of your mouth was thank you. Not after coffee, not after the chores, not once the day had proved itself worth thanking anyone for. Before your feet touched the floor, and before anything was asked for.
I have turned that over for forty years and I keep arriving at the same place. The order is the whole teaching. Gratitude that arrives after the good news is just accounting, a sum you do at the end of the day to see whether you came out ahead. Gratitude that arrives before the day has shown you anything is a different instrument entirely, because it sets the state you will meet the day in, and the state you meet a day in largely decides what the day turns out to contain.
She would not have said any of that. She said thank you, out loud, in the dark, every morning of her life without missing one, and she expected the household to do the same, and the reasoning was left for a great-grandson with too much schooling to work out later.
Why a house is the unit
Everything I now do with organizations comes out of this, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see the connection. When I sit with a leadership team and they tell me the culture is bad, what they are almost always describing is a room where the available true things have been narrowed to the discouraging ones, by long habit, by nobody in particular. No policy did that. Sentences did it, one at a time, over years.
You cannot raise a far messenger in a house with bad energy. I have written that line before and people take it as a warm sentiment, but I mean it structurally. A child who is going to be trusted with something valuable across hard country has to grow up hearing the world described as a place where arriving is possible. That description is built out of ordinary sentences said at ordinary moments by adults who were not thinking about it.
The same is exactly true of a team, and of a community, and of a nation. The words are the construction material. There is no other one.
What I would try
I am wary of turning my great-grandmother into a technique, so take this as a description of what I actually do rather than a program for anyone else.
In the morning, before the phone, I say thank you for one named thing. Named, not general, because the general version is a habit and the named version is an act of attention.
Through the day, when I catch myself narrating something to another person, I ask whether I would be content to have that sentence standing in a year. Most sentences are fine. A few are bricks I would not want in a wall.
And around the young ones, and around people who are carrying more than they can comfortably hold, I keep the ratio honest. Not false. Honest. The good things are also true, and somebody has to say them out loud or they do not get built.
Masan died a long time ago now. The house she ran had no electricity and no running water and four hundred sheep she knew by name. I am in my fifties, and I have worked in boardrooms on four continents, and I have never found a better tool than the thank you and the watched word.
Tony Skrelūnas writes The Ancestral Watch — Stone Breath, The Amber and the Stone, The Council Fire and The Far Messengers — and the working reader, Living as a Far Messenger. He is a PhD candidate; his dissertation looks at human and organisational performance through three ancestral lenses: Diné, Lithuanian and Japanese. He holds a faculty appointment at 1440 Multiversity, where teaching is the centre of the work now. He runs at dawn and hikes with a corgi named Roper.
Last reviewed September 2026.