I'm picking up my granddaughter from school and she climbs into the car with this look on her face. Not sad, not angry, just um flat, empty, like someone turned off a light inside her. She's 15.
I ask her how her day was and she shrugs. I ask if something happened and she says no. Then after a long silence, she says something that's been rattling around in my head ever since.
She says, "Grandpa, does it ever feel like nothing you do actually matters? I'm George and I'm 87 years old. I've lived through wars, recessions, family tragedies, and personal failures I wouldn't wish on anyone.
" And that question from my granddaughter, it shook me. because I've asked myself that same question more times than I can count. The difference is I'm at the end of my life looking back and she's at the beginning uh looking forward and somewhere between those two perspectives I think I finally understand something important.
We live in a world um obsessed with impact. Everyone wants to leave their mark, change the world, be remembered. I see it everywhere.
People chase careers they think will make them uh significant. They post online hoping for validation. They measure their worth by how many people know their name.
And I get it. I really do. But here's what I've learned after nearly nine decades on this planet.
The things that actually matter rarely feel like they matter at the time. Let me tell you about my neighbor Margaret. She lived three houses down from us for 42 years.
Margaret was a school teacher, never married, no children of her own. She taught third grade at the same elementary school for her entire career. When she retired, there was a small gathering in the school gymnasium.
Maybe um 30 people showed up. No cameras, no speeches that would be remembered. She got a plaque and a bouquet of flowers.
Two years later, she passed away uh quietly in her sleep. At her funeral, I expected a modest turnout. Margaret had always been private, unassuming.
But that church was packed, standing room only, and one by one, people stood up to speak. A doctor who said Margaret was the first person who made him feel uh smart. A woman who ran a nonprofit who said Margaret taught her to read when everyone else had given up.
a man in his 50s who brought his own daughter and said he became a teacher because of Margaret. Story after story, lives changed, directions altered, all because of a woman who thought she was just doing her um job. Margaret never tried to change the world.
She never sought recognition. She showed up day after day and paid attention to the kids in front of her. She learned their names.
She noticed when they struggled, she stayed late to help them understand fractions or spelling words. Nothing glamorous, nothing that would make uh headlines, but the ripples from her life are still spreading decades later through people she'll never meet. I think we've got it backwards.
We think mattering means being seen, being known, being remembered by crowds. But that's not how life actually works. Life is built on small moments between people.
A conversation that shifts someone's perspective. A kindness that arrives exactly when someone's about to give up. Showing up when it's inconvenient.
Listening when you'd rather talk. These things don't feel significant when they're happening. They feel ordinary, routine, easy to um dismiss.
When I was 39, I went through a rough patch. My business was struggling. Money was tight.
I was drinking more than I should have been, sleeping less than I needed. I felt like a a failure. One evening I was sitting in my car outside a bar trying to decide whether to go in and this guy I barely knew, Tom, knocked on my window.
We'd met maybe um twice before. He said he was heading to get coffee and asked if I wanted to join him. Just like that.
No big intervention, no lecture, just coffee. We sat in a diner for 2 hours. He didn't ask me what was wrong.
He didn't try to fix anything. He just talked about normal things. His kids, a book he was reading, a trip he'd taken years ago.
And somehow in the middle of that completely uh ordinary conversation, something in me settled. I didn't go into that bar. I went home.
I can't even remember everything we talked about, but that moment mattered. It changed uh the trajectory of my night, maybe my life, and Tom probably forgot about it by the next morning. That's the thing about mattering.
It's almost never dramatic. It doesn't announce itself. You won't get a notification telling you that something you did changed someone's life.
Most of the time you'll never know. You'll do something that feels small to you and it'll be everything to someone else and you'll move on thinking it didn't amount to um anything. My wife Elellanena used to write letters, real letters with stamps and everything.
She'd write to our kids when they were away at college. She'd write to old friends she hadn't seen in years. She'd write to cousins, neighbors, anyone who crossed her mind.
I used to tease her about it. I'd say, "Lone has phones now. Just call them.
" She'd smile and keep writing. After she passed, I found boxes of letters people had written back to her. And in almost every one, someone mentioned how much her letters meant, how they'd kept certain ones for years, how they'd read them during hard times.
She wasn't trying to matter. She was just reaching out, but she mattered um enormously. Here's what I wish someone had told me when I was younger.
Your life doesn't need to be extraordinary to matter. In fact, it probably shouldn't be. The pressure to be exceptional, to stand out, to make a big splash.
That pressure crushes people. It makes them feel like their ordinary life isn't enough. Like showing up for their family, doing their work honestly, being kind to strangers, like none of that counts unless it's packaged into something uh impressive.
But the truth is, almost everything that holds our world together is done by people no one will remember. Parents who get up in the middle of the night with sick children. Workers who show up on time and do their jobs well.
Friends who check in when they notice someone's hurting. Volunteers who serve meals, clean parks, visit hospitals. People who vote, who recycle, who return shopping carts.
small unremarkable acts that keep everything from falling um apart. You want to know if you matter. Look at the people directly in front of you.
Are you present with them? Are you honest? Are you kind when you don't have to be?
Do you keep your promises? Do you make room for other people's pain? Do you celebrate their joy?
These questions won't land you on magazine covers. They won't build your platform or expand your influence, but they'll determine whether your life actually meant uh something. I've been thinking about my granddaughter's question a lot.
Does anything I do actually matter? And I've realized the question itself is the problem. Because when we ask if we matter, we're usually asking if we matter in some grand measurable way.
if we're important, influential, exceptional. But mattering doesn't work like that. Mattering is quieter.
Um it's more personal. It's knowing that your presence or absence would make a real difference to um real people. When my grandson was seven, he was terrified of water.
Wouldn't go near a pool. One summer I spent 3 weeks 15 minutes a day just standing with him at the shallow end. I didn't push.
I didn't lecture. I just stood there while he got used to it. By the end of summer he was swimming.
Now he's 23 and he probably doesn't remember those 15inut sessions. But I do because I know that if I hadn't been there patient and steady, his fear might have stayed with him. That's mattering.
Not because it's impressive, cuz it's real. The older I get, the more I realize that most of what we're chasing is smoke. Status disappears.
Achievements fade. People forget your accomplishments faster than you'd believe. But they don't forget how you made them feel.
They don't forget that you showed up. They don't forget that you saw them when they felt invisible. Those things stick.
They echo forward in ways you'll never fully um understand. I was at the grocery store last week and the young woman at the checkout counter looked exhausted. Dark circles under her eyes, moving slowly.
I could have just paid and left, but I asked her how she was doing. really asked, not the automatic question we all throw around. She looked surprised, then her eyes filled up.
She told me she'd been working double shifts because her mother was sick. We talked for maybe uh 3 minutes. I told her she was doing something honorable, that her mother was lucky to have her.
When I left, she thanked me twice. Will that conversation change the world? No.
Did it matter to her in that moment? I think it did. So, here's my answer to my granddaughter and maybe to you.
Yes. What you do matters, but probably not in the ways you think. It matters in the small moments, the unglamorous ones, the ones you won't post about or put on a resume.
It matters when you choose patience over anger. When you tell the truth even when lying is easier. When you help someone even though no one's watching.
When you stay when leaving would be um simpler. Your life doesn't have to be a spectacle to matter. It just has to be honest, present, kind.
And that's harder than it sounds because those things require you to pay attention, to show up even when you're tired, to care even when it's inconvenient. But that's where real significance lives, not in the spotlight, in the steady, quiet work of being human with other uh humans. I'm 87.
I don't have many years left. And when I think about what I want my life to have meant, I don't think about awards or recognition. I think about the people I loved well.
The moments I was fully present. The times I helped without needing credit. The conversations where I really listened.
Those are the things that mattered. Those are the things that will outlast me. If any of this lands with you, I'd appreciate it if you'd share this video with someone who needs to hear it.
Drp a comment and let me know what's one small thing you're going to pay more attention to. And uh subscribe if you want more of these conversations. Um I've got a bit more to say before I'm done.
And I'd like to say it to people who actually want to listen.
