With each step his feet sank into the warm golden sand. Today was hotter than normal and the usual gang of sunbathing teenagers were nowhere to be seen. As he walked along the deserted beach he couldn’t help but notice the scattering of starfish that lay exposed to the harsh summer sun. They must have been deposited by the retreating tide and were now stuck in a hopeless state of abandonment. “Such a shame” he thought to himself, concluding that the shear volume of starfish prevented all hopes of a significant rescue attempt.

Off in the distance the man could make out the figure of a small child, no older than 11 judging by her height. It was odd. The girl seemed to dotting back-and-forth between the top of the beach and the sea. What was she doing?

As he got nearer he could see that she was running her own one-person rescue operation. She’d run up the beach to collect a handful of stranded starfish and then sprint back down to the breaking waves and release them into the sea. Occasionally she’d stop halfway and just hurl them into the water in an attempt to speed up the process.

Scanning the hundreds of starfish stranded on the beach the man approached the girl and said, “You cannot save them all you know. There’s too many. You’ll never make a difference.” The girl bent down pick up another starfish. Hurling it into the ocean she turned to face the man and replied:

“It made a difference to that one.”