Did It Even Matter?
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” -Gandalf, as played by Ian McKellan, The Fellowship of the Ring
During my career in leadership, I have easily heard well over a hundred motivational speakers tell many different stories. Each one has their own unique perspective on life, leadership, and success. If I am being honest, I have forgotten what many of them taught me.
At the time I saw them, their words may have had a great impact on me and some of their lessons may have stayed with me subconsciously, yet their actual words have faded from my mind. But there was one speaker who I saw that has stuck with me everyday since I listened to his words. His name was Wes Moore and he was talking about his book, “The Other Wes Moore.” During his presentation, he recited this line from that book and I haven’t been able to forget it:
“When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were even here.”
It’s a really powerful quote and to be fair, I did have to look up the full quote because it was the last part that really seared into my memory banks…
“Make sure mattered you were even here.”
It’s a big task right? Making sure your life and actions have meaning and impact. You see, when I say that it stuck with me — I mean that it haunted me.
What started out as a positive challenge that forced me to think about being productive and not wasting time eventually turned into a monster that followed me around making me feel guilty whenever I wasn’t being productive. Sitting around by myself watching Netflix or playing a game on my phone weren’t things that would help me change the world. They wouldn’t make it matter that I was here.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, my purpose in life, my why, is to create positive change in the world around me. It’s a why statement that really should dovetail well into making sure my actions mattered. Right?
But why is it that my why statement could make me feel so positive, yet this other quote that essentially seemed to say the same thing could push me towards depression? It literally didn’t make any sense to me. It bothered me almost two years.
Suddenly, one day when I was feeling extra depressed, something clicked and I saw it. My why of creating positive change focuses me on the here and now. When I was thinking about my why, I wasn’t over analyzing every action I took. Instead, I was looking for opportunities to do the right thing and make things better for others.
Wes Moore’s statement instead aimed my brain at the long view but with the extra perspective of thinking about the end of life. It gave finality to the whole thing. Which of course, isn’t something we love thinking about. To make it worse, it had me thinking about all the things I should have accomplished by the end of life.
The issue was that I wasn’t considering the actual vantage point of the end of my life. Instead it was from the perspective of me sitting on the couch binge watching a show on Netflix while thinking about all the things in my life I should be doing. To be fair, that’s not the best perspective from which to consider anything, let alone whether your life mattered.
It’s a very flawed perspective that does not in anyway allow us to see things clearly. I’m sure you’ve experienced it before… That moment where you see all the things you should be accomplishing but instead you are watching mindless TV or taking a nap or doing a million other different things that “don’t matter.”
The truth is making sure it mattered you were here isn’t about constantly doing things that change lives or change the world. It’s about paying attention to opportunities and then helping out as you can. It’s about creating positive change. But that absolutely doesn’t mean you can’t take a break to relax and refresh.
The quote from Gandalf that started this article sums it up best, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” At that point in his story, dark times have come to the world and our heroes are struggling with the task at hand. They have the chance to make a meaningful difference in the world and some of them are afraid. But they do it anyway — because it needs to be done. They didn’t all survive the journey, but they absolutely made sure it mattered that they were there.
I believe that you can do it too!
-Jason