Sometimes we think that we're just wasting our time writing articles or recording a podcast.
Or maybe even the advice we give seems to go nowhere. You'd be surprised to know that you're making an impact beyond your wildest imagination
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
I was at an art shop one morning and a stranger came up to me and said, “I know you.”
Back then, like everybody else, I prided myself on remembering faces. But I couldn't remember names. Yet this person who is talking to me, I had no idea who he was. And he kept insisting that he knew me.
So I decided to ask “Where do you know me from?”
And this is what he said, “We sat next to each other on a flight, it was a short flight and I'd been talking about how I wanted to learn to draw because I'd started out as a kid. And I didn't really continue that practice. And as a result, I don't draw.”
And you spoke to me for a while, and you suggested that I keep drawing, and you showed me a diary. And we went through all of this discussion on the plane. And here I am.
He said, in the art shop, not for the first time or the second time, but I've been coming back ever since, because I've started to draw and paint and it's all because of you.
Now, contrary to what you might think, this is not about me going around doing good deeds. I do that, like many people, but it wasn't so much about the good deed. Instead, it's about the impact that you make on just about anybody else.
As you go through your day, you don't know what you're doing that could change somebody else's life. You might try to pass the cafe, having just read some email that made you feel really happy and you have this big smile in your face.
And someone is sitting in the cafe and they're not having the best of days and they see you with this big smile and this stride, you're almost skipping.
And suddenly their mood shifts.
It shifts just a little, but it does shift and they think, oh, wait. I could have some of the happiness too. As we go through the day, we spread this kind of happiness, luminous, all these kind of moods to people that we know and people we don't know.
But there's also something else that we are doing on a consistent basis. And that is, we are putting out information. Like for instance, now I'm doing this podcast, and you might try to write an article, you might try to a little booklet, You might make a video, you might send a little note to someone.
It doesn't matter what we're doing, somehow, somewhere we are like the little butterfly that flaps its wings and it creates a typhoon on the other side of the planet.
I'll give you a little story.
I once met a baker in Copenhagen. This place had just won an award for the best cross-hawing the city. And so I was curious. How did the baker learn. How to make such a bread.
And he said, well, I tried it on my own. And then I kind of went and tried to learn it with other people. But eventually, I ran into this one video on YouTube. And that changed my life.
And I'm not sure that the guy who made that video knows how he changed the life of a baker, got him to this award-winning situation and brought delight to all of the customers that come there.
We don't know the impact that we have when we are putting out that little piece of information. We think, oh, we're just on a content schedule. We just have to put out this information.
But if we have just that little emotion, just that little something that we're pushing forward, something that we feel, it gets to somebody. It might not get to somebody today, or six months or now.
Sometimes something that we've written 20 years prior comes back and people go, I remember that moment. I remember that chocolate, I remember that card, I remember that little article that one line that's something that you said to me on the plane, even though it was a short flight.
So as you go through a day, today, whether you're adding music to a podcast like this, or you're editing a movie, or doing something that you think could be rather mundane, could be something that nobody really appreciates.
It's possible that it's true that it just passes like a ship in the night, but it also is possible that it has an impact way beyond what you think is real or doable. It could change someone's life.
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