The Internet makes it easy to matter a little bit to a lot of people.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of people will send you an e-mail, read your tweets, look at your photos and think of you over the course of a month.
But how many of those people really matter to you? And how much time do you invest in those relationships?
Something I read today stopped me in my tracks because of how it answers those questions. It’s a quote from an entrepreneur named Rajesh Setty in a new ebook called What Matters Now:
If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been even better if they had met you earlier.
You can tell who really matters to you by looking back and asking yourself, who do I wish had been there sooner?
For me, there are a few dozen people who really matter — people I wish had been there to change my life sooner. Their faces come to me in a rush.
The sad thing is, I rarely talk to many of them. Some of them I don’t talk to at all. They may have forgotten about me or assumed I didn’t care.
I can’t stay in touch with them because I’m too busy focusing on everyone else, the people who are useful (or just noisy) here and now.
My absent friends and mentors don’t care about being useful here and now. They just care about me. And because they care, they can wait — until tomorrow or next week or during the holidays, whenever things quiet down.
The problem is that things never quiet down. But in the meantime, the relationships that really matter, they sure do.
Share your story: Who do you miss in your past? How would your life be different if you had met them earlier? Leave a comment
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