The Two-Year Smile Project
Story★★★★For many years, David Berg and his wife, Maria, took vigorous walks for their daily exercise. That one point, they kept crossing paths with a certain older man. They eventually learned that he was a bachelor and that his name was Feliciano, meaning “happy.” He seems anything but happy, though.
“He had the grumpiest look you ever saw,” Berg later recalled. “He was always well dressed in a nice suit, and he seemed to be an important man in town, but he would walk along with his hands folded behind his back, staring at the ground.
Whenever Maria or I tried to catch his eye and smile at him, he quickly looked the other way. We wanted so much to turn his frown into a smile that we made that our secret project. It took two years, but finally he smiled back at us.
From that day on, Feliciano’s countenance and whole manner changed.”
The point
David Berg and his wife spent two years trying to get a grumpy old man named Feliciano to smile, and when he finally did, his whole demeanor changed.