This post is part of a mini-series on seven principles for living gratefully: read more about the principles of gifts, abundance, precarious goodness, prioritizing goodness, promoting goodness, nourishing reliance, and goodwillism.

One of my all-time favorite psychology experiments is also one of the quirkiest. It’s a study on inattentional blindness—our tendency to miss what’s right in front of us when our attention is locked on something else.

In this classic experiment, participants watched a video of individuals passing basketballs and were asked to count the number of passes made by one team. Seems simple enough. But in the middle of the game, a person in a gorilla suit walked through, paused, thumped their chest, and strolled off.

Here’s the kicker: A whopping 56% of participants didn’t notice the gorilla. They were so focused on counting passes that they completely missed something glaringly unusual and obvious.

If you’ve never seen the........

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