Changing The World
No One Notices When You Change The World
No One Cares When You Change The World
Changing the world sounds like a dream or a fantasy, but in actuality, everyone changes the world everyday. Everyone who leaves their house and goes outside to interact with others or interact with the world is changing it in some way. It may not always be in a big way, but it is changing the world for something. Every interaction that we have with other people is what changes us and them.
“You’re going to change the world someday.” That’s my advice. Cliche and awful, isn’t it? But why is it so awful to believe that you can change the world in your own way, in a positive way? I changed my world. I changed the world. Yet, almost 99.9999999% of people have no idea who I am or what I’ve done in my life. I did start an amazing personal project called My Life As A Woman during COVID-19 in which I wanted to obtain the voice of a woman from every country in the world. On May 5, 2020, I began. On August 28th, 2020. I finished.
Between my team and I, we spoke to about 1,500 women, asking them if they were interested in changing the world. It was a stupid dream at the time. It seemed an awkward unrealistic question but to me, it was a good question. Yet with the quarantine lockdown, I really believed I had an opportunity open to me that no one else saw or would have ever done. I secretly wished someone else would have done it, but I already knew that no one would have ever done something like it before. The unique opportunity to talk to a woman representative from every country in the world. Why would anyone do this project or think about women and what they are thinking? Who does that? Women are important. So it was me, I am the one who did it.
In the My Life As A Woman: World Edition book, I write about changing the world. If you’ve ever known me personally, you’ll know that I’ve always seen everyone as being capable of changing the world. Of course, I am not going to say that the 70-year old man in his wheelchair or the middle-aged single mother of two who is working her butt off is going to change the world in the way you think. It is possible they could possibly come up with a life-changing idea that the entire world loves, but 99% of most people are not going to do that. Instead, they will change the world in their own ways.
Story of Changing the World #1
The middle-aged single mother of two, who had her kids in her late teens into her twenties was working her butt off to make ends meet and support her children. She gets up everyday, faces her reality, and understands that she must go to work, must send her children off to school, and must follow the same routine everyday in order to support and provide a better life for her children. Her children are technically her world and she is working for them and herself.
She is doing her best, as any mother can try, even finding time to help her children with homework, cook nice meals for them, and they even have fun on the weekends. While she feels lonely, wanting companionship, her children are her world for now and will remain that way until they have grown. Her children noticed she was always trying, even when they would see her cry sometimes, but she always was in seemingly good spirits. No matter what, she never gave up. Her children saw it.
Luckily for mom, her children were A and B students, trying their best, just like their mother. Although mom did struggle financially, both her kids, and even mom ended up attending a community college together, where mom met the man of her dreams, and her kids went on to study at the University level, and ended up in good careers helping other people.
Story of Changing the World #2
An old lonely man wheels himself to the park everyday and he watches the kids play basketball on the court. Basketball was always his favorite sport and he was fascinated by the talent on the court, the fast, yet calculated moves of the kids, yet for them, they were in their own world just having fun, not really caring, but always aiming for that basket.
One day, the kids noticed the old man and asked him why he was always watching their game. He explained to them that he was a coach, and he began talking about the game and eventually began providing tips to the kids. The old man lived until he was 99 years old, dying just a week before his 100th birthday, but every other weekend, he still showed up, despite his declining health. Several of those kids went on to play college basketball and two of them ended up in the NBA.
It turns out that the reason the old man lived for so long despite being “a lonely old man” is that he had a reason to keep living: he loved those kids and all the kids that came to the courts, influencing them to stay away from drugs, stay in school, and despite their own busy schedules and fame once they reached it, they always met back on the courts every other weekend so the old man could still watch them and give them tips. He was in his glory every game.
The NBA players funded an after-school project in their neighborhood to get the kids playing and away from gangs and drugs. The two boys who got contracted into the NBA were still in their glory because the old man was part of their success. When he was gone, they lost a father and a grandfather. He was the dad and grandfather that many of them never got to know. They too, were inspired, and would continue helping young boys “stay in the game” throughout their lives.
The point of the stories is to show that changing the world is not always apparent and not always direct. Your very presence, even something you say, can make or break some things in the world. Many times, changing the world has to simply deal with an act of kindness that sets in motion a series of good streaks in all of us so long as we strive to do our best and be ourselves. Changing the world involves you doing what you are passionate about and sharing that gift, and that excitement with others.
It is not always easy and not everyone will care about your passion. Sometimes, it is yours — and yours alone, and you must do with it what you will, whether you can use it for good in the world, or even in your own world. Most of the women in the My Life As A Woman Project were not famous. They were not rich. They were not all happy. They were not all sad. They were not all married. They were not all single mothers. They were not all divorced. They were from various backgrounds and the one thing they all had in common: they wanted to change the world. More specifically, they wanted to change something in the world. Even more specific, in their world.
Changing the world may have meant that it was changing something about their workplace or something about themselves. It had nothing to do with world domination or controlling anything. If control has anything to do with it, it is taking control of the situation or taking control of their lives. The stories above are shining examples of what people who change the world do. They don’t even know they are changing the world. They just do what they know they should be doing and for the most part, the universe was designed to flow in the way we all need it to flow, in a positive way.
There are bad things that happen to us. There are many more things out of our control. While I could say to you that these things were meant to test you, and maybe some of them were, or we might ask what you did to deserve such a thing to happen to you, the answer may not be that simple or it may be more simple than we want to think. Life and the universe are always about balance and in order for the world to exist as it does, it must have opposites. Good has bad. Cold has hot. Up has down. Man has woman. Even love has hate. Sometimes, things just happen to us that are not always good. That is part of what happens in our lives sometimes.
Did what I do change the world? Probably not. Did I change someone’s world? Whoever reads the book might be changed by it or by anything I write might be changing their world. I have no idea how many lives I have touched for the better, but my hope in doing this was that it was all for the best. If 1% of the world reads the My Life As A Woman: World Edition book, maybe they will be inspired to change the world themselves. If 100% of the world reads it, even better. That would mean literacy rates on this planet are amazing.
I can only hope that my small change in many people’s lives has made a big difference in the world for the better. Out of about 1,500 women, 530 women decided to join the project and help me make the change in the world that they saw I was trying to make. These women were different. They were game-changers and world-changers. These are not women I could ever control. Nor would I ever have any desire for controlling them. They exuberate the changes we need in the world. If not for them, I might not believe that women are literally capable of changing anything in this world.
This was their gift to you of telling you what “My Life As A Woman” is like to you and just one part in changing the world. I only played my part in being the messenger. They all still must go on with their lives, working, sleeping, eating, cooking, caring, and everything else a woman does in her routine. I only asked them if they were interested in helping me change the world. And because these women took part in such a grand project, they showed everyone that anyone is capable of changing the world.
