What was the impact?

Every day, everyone spends their time doing stuff. Work, family, community, entertainment. 24 hours a day of doing, even if that time is spent not doing.

What about the big stuff. The culmination of efforts that actually make a difference. Make change. Matter. How do you string together your effort so that it creates meaningful change?

My high school baseball coach would tell me, “you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse, you’re not staying the same”. He would then follow up with “if you get a little better every day, over a long period of time, you get a lot better”. I subscribed to this and became a decent baseball player, and use this disposition to continue to get better in personal endeavors. There is real merit in self improvement.

In self improvement, there is a realization that those around you impact your ability to succeed. The notion of surround yourself with great people, or ‘you are the composite of the seven people you are with the most’ start to come to life. I believe without question we are a byproduct of our environment, and to the extent we can design that environment with good people and fundamentally good experiences, we will be better.

But what if you get better and it doesn’t matter? Did you change people for the better, did your work actually inspire change. Once your accomplishment is over, will it be status quo the next day or is change happening?

The goal needs to be larger. If you improve and successfully accomplish your goal, great. But if that success doesn’t make a real impact, was it too small? Perhaps. Let’s say this is a process and you have to learn to improve yourself first. Then you have to surround yourself with great people, as the environment matters. Then, you recognize that improvement should be larger than a personal objective. You set to make change and the marker for change is did the world change. This is the Think Big moment, when you begin to take aim to Change The World, Environment, Have a Dream.

Can each of us actually have this type of impact, or is it just reserved for the special few; Jobs, Elon, Dr. King.