How to Make Your Work Significant
Your work does not have to be groundbreaking to be significant.
It needs to help others, and contribute value in a way that only your work can.
This isn’t the way we normally think of evaluating things, especially from a lens of business growth, awards, social media followers, advertising and KPIs.
Referencing Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Maya Angelou and others, Chase Jarvis was speaking about creating legacy in your creative work, and I took a lot away from it.
Whether you’re helping one person or one million, the real measure of significance is the difference you make, the impact your work has on anyone else. This is something I thought about in my early days in the nonprofit space and even from hearing religious teachings – yet it’s still sometimes challenging to see what may appear to be “small” scale impact as significant, when compared to the massive problems the world faces (billions of people in poverty, for example).
I carried my passion for helping others into the business world a decade ago, continuing to support nonprofits and emerging founders, even when it wasn’t profitable. So reading that “generosity infuses your work with significance” was a refreshing reminder.
Significance is not only about your work, but also about the connections you build through it, learning and collaborating within your community. This amplifies the impact of your work. I believe that none of my projects, businesses or organizations would’ve been considered “successful” or “significant” without community and collaboration.
This is a reminder that:
It’s a long game, planting seeds over time.
It’s about contributing to something bigger.
I resonated with what Chase Jarvis shared on his podcast episode called “how to create legacy in your creative work”.
