Planting seeds

It all starts from that one person. One small step.

Most people assume that changing the world is virtually impossible, so they do not even attempt to do so. Why bother when it is going to be futile?

But most people do not know the impact of a ripple effect. In the movie Pay It Forward, there are two main takeaways. One, a small act of kindness can snowball into an unexpectedly large chain of events. Two, if the rule of the game is for one person to pay it forward to three, and those three, in turn, pay it forward to three people each, the effect is exponential.

It all starts from that one person. One small step.

With technology, it is so much easier for a piece of work to reach an audience exponentially. A blog post can reach tens of people easily, much less three.

We do not have to dramatically alter the course of history. We can aim to make the world slightly better. Write a blog post to tell your story, tweet something meaningful, contribute to open-source, provide feedback to the products you use, write tutorials — the list goes on. These do not require a lot of work.

We do not need to be superhuman. Little initiatives are like seeds. Plenty of times all we need to do is to plant them and watch them grow. Throw them out there without expectations. Birds may carry them to foreign lands. They may sprout elsewhere without you knowing. Somebody may learn something from a tutorial you write today and put it to good use on some piece of software tomorrow. That piece of software may turn out be a medical application saving tons of lives in a couple of months. Who knows?

Why should you underestimate your potential impact on this world?

You have no idea what will resonate with whom, and even if it makes one other single soul in this world happier, that one small step is still better than none.

A journey of a thousand miles begin with a single step. – Confucius