“My whole life, I was told that we were one of the richest nations on earth, but now I see that we are one of the poorest. It’s like my whole life has been wasted.”
That comment marked one of the saddest and most poignant moments of my life. Here’s the story.
At one point in our life together, my wife, Coleen, and I were foster parents. Over the years we had 19 foster children of various sexes, races, and physical and emotional disabilities. One of those was Michael, who arrived in our home as a 17-year-old refugee from Albania, which was then the most closed and repressive socialist country in the world. Michael had escaped the regime by swimming across a portion of the Adriatic Sea and eventually landing in a UN refugee camp in what was then Yugoslavia. During the time that Michael was in our home, the regime fell Albania and the country opened up. Michael was able to speak with his parents via a phone in the village where his family lived.
One thing leads to another, and a couple of years later Coleen and I visited his parents in their village in the remote foothills in Albania. We eventually hosted John, Michael’s 80-ish father, for a couple of weeks in our home.
Culture shock is too mild a term to describe John’s experiences. For example, Albania at that time did not have a single stop light in the country because there was no need for one. There were no cars; people walked or traveled in oxcarts. Bringing John to America was like time travel — fast-forwarding him a couple of hundred years. He was overwhelmed and awestruck. The treadmill, for example, was a source of amusement – “Why would somebody walk on it when they could just walk outside? Silly Americans.” Expressways provided a terrifying experience; air conditioning was a wonder.
As we escorted him to the airplane that would take him back to Albania, he thanked us, said good bye to his son, and then said, “My whole life, I was told that we were one of the richest nations on earth, but now I see that we are one of the poorest. It’s like my whole life has been wasted.”
For years that moment stuck with me like a weight on my heart – every time I thought of it, I felt sad.
But, in recent years I’ve seen it differently. John was wrong. His life wasn’t wasted, unless of course you judge your life solely by the amount of material possessions you’ve accumulated. It is true that the socialist government lied to him for a lifetime, and that those lies narrowed his world and prevented him from seeing opportunities he never had.
But John made the most of the situation in which he found himself. He was the village elder, and helped his villagers survive in a difficult time. He and his wife raised two children and instilled a sound character in them, embedding one with the self-confidence and courage necessary to escape. There was something in John that sought for more, and he instilled that hunger to do more, see more, be more, and accomplish more into his prodigy. He made an impact. He had influence. In John’s world, he was significant.
Understanding significance
According to Meriam-Webster, Significance is defined this way: “the quality of being important: the quality of having notable worth or influence.” Wiktionary sheds this light on it: “extent to which something matters.”
While there is a degree of significance to be achieved though one’s family – John had influence on his family, for example — my focus in this article is on a higher level of significance. Having “notable worth or influence” implies that significance on that level is relatively rare. People take note of it.
Suppose you could lay a foundation of significance with your family, and then reached out to "matter” to a larger world. Suppose you could seek significance in your career and your business.
Just that idea alone would put you in as special category. The sad truth is that very few people seek to be significant to anyone over and above their core family. Most people are content to just get by. In my work of helping sales forces sell better, for example, I’ve often observed that if you randomly select 20 salespeople and survey them, you’ll find that only one of those 20 have spent $25 of their own money on their own improvement over the course of the year. While salespeople happen to be the professional group with whom I am most familiar, I suspect that salespeople are not unique in their indifference to personal improvement. Probably the same thing could be said about product managers, customer service representatives, social workers, and every other job title.
Gaining significance means, among other things, performing in such a way as to be notable. Notable implies performance above and beyond the average. And that means striving for excellence in your work or business. Striving for excellence means continually improving yourself. You can’t become excellent unless you do better – forever. And doing better means sharpening the saw and continually improving. So, being indifferent to personal improvement is to deny an attraction to significance.
Why bother?
There are compelling reasons to strive for significance in your career and your business. One is the exceptional positive impact on people. As we noted in the definition, significance is defined by its impact on others. To be “notable” requires people to notice. To be “important” requires someone else to deem it so. So, significance is achieved through positive impact on other people.
There is something in the soul of human beings that compels us to help others. So many of these ideas rise out of the Judeo-Christian mindset and scriptures. We only have one life, the Bible tells us, and we should live it with an eye toward eternity. “Love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus commanded. Significance is one manifestation of that command. It informs the way you do your job and live your life, encouraging you to make the most of every minute by positively impacting others.
But significance also reaches inward and prompts us to attain more of our potential, to be more, and to achieve more. Insignificant people are content to utilize a fraction of their potential. Those who strive for significance stretch themselves, put themselves in challenging situations so that they stretch and build the abilities and competencies they were born with. Show me a person who continually challenges himself/herself, who pushes the boundaries of latent potential to exercise more of that potential, I’ll show you someone who is growing in significance.
Significance then, can be much more than just a handy phrase. It can be an organizing principle in one’s life, ordering priorities and organizing actions in pursuit of a higher calling.
The price to pay
Maybe that’s why so few people seek it. Its not easy, it doesn’t come quickly and there are prices to pay as you seek it.
Significance in your job or business requires several things: Motivation, focus, sacrifice and discipline, to begin with.
Motivation speaks to that desire that wells up from inside a person to be significant. It probably won’t happen by chance. You’ll need to want it. As a lifetime student of motivation (I’m forever asked how to motivate a salesforce, for example) I’ve observed that motivation is rarely injected from outside, but instead is often instilled during our formative years– typically very intentionally by parents or circumstances. Motivation is often kept in check by our beliefs and our thinking habits. Once we have the idea that we can be significant in our careers and our businesses, that concept can free us to unleash motivation that has lain dormant.
Focus speaks to our ability to prioritize and harness our resources to the highest priority tasks. Once we have decided to seek significance, we need to focus on those things that will bring us closer to that goal.
Sacrifice is that dragon that guards the path to significance and discourages most people from taking the next step. The idea of giving some things up now in exchange for greater influence later just doesn’t resonate with many of our colleagues. For many, the choice between buying tickets to a ball game, or paying for a seminar is a no-brainer. Taking a cut in pay for a promotion that brings greater influence is, for those uninterested in significance, an unreasonable choice.
Discipline is, like sacrifice, a word that scares many people. It this context, discipline means that you exert your will to invest time and energy into things that move you closer to significance, even if they are difficult and uncomfortable.
There are other characteristics that inform the character and practices of the person who seeks significance and we’ll treat them in other articles.
Sounds like a challenge, and it is. That’s why few people really choose to seek significance in their careers and businesses. But for those believe there is more to life than just this, that they can be more, achieve more, and impact more, it can provide an overarching way of life and a lifetime of fulfillment.
The first step is to recognize that it is available to you, and to decide you want it.
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