Work That Matters
A while back I read a blog post called The Art of Mattering by Scott Ginsberg. It stopped me in my tracks. What we do needs to matter. My training needs to matter. My design work, my writing, my life needs to matter. To matter means to make a difference.
That's a different question than "is my work good?" or "is my business growing?" It's a harder question: does what I do actually matter to anyone?
Here are three ways Ginsberg suggests we can matter more — and they've stuck with me ever since.
Innovation That Simplifies
If your idea doesn't solve a real problem for the world, you're just doing something cool. Never underestimate the marketability of practicality. Does usefulness have a palpable presence in your work? The most enduring creative businesses aren't the flashiest — they're the ones that make someone's life genuinely easier or clearer.
Interaction That Elevates
The point is to leave people better. To help them walk away from an encounter with a more colorful vision of what they can contribute. How do people experience themselves in relation to you? After a conversation, a training session, a project — do they feel more capable, more clear, more confident? That's the work that matters.
Experience That Educates
We learn not from our experiences, but from intelligent reflection upon them. It all depends on whether you're willing to listen for the lesson — then document and share it. What did you write today? The act of writing forces the reflection. The act of sharing makes it matter to someone else.
Mattering Is a Choice
That's the part that hit me hardest. Mattering isn't something that happens to you. It's a choice — the choice to be consequential, to fulfill your whole capacity for living, to take responsibility for feeling insignificant rather than waiting for someone else to make you feel significant.
At work. In life. In everything you create.
The question worth asking regularly: does this matter? Not to the algorithm, not to a metrics dashboard — but to the person on the other end of your work. If the answer is yes, keep going. If it's not, that's worth knowing too.