Making a difference

Do you believe you can make a difference?
In your life? In someone else’s life? Or in the world at large?

Do you believe you can make a difference?

I’m not going to answer for you. You’ll have to find your own answer, because it won’t have any real value to you unless it’s yours and you do believe it. But I can share my answer with you and my answer is yes, I believe I can make a difference and yes, I believe that the choices I make every day do matter, not only to myself, but to the people around me, to my work and in fact to the whole world that I live in – if only on a very small scale.

I’m not going to dwell on this very much further right now, I’m just going to share a story I once heard on some not-quite-so-silly TV show which I think pretty much says it all:

One fine day, a guy comes walking down to the beach, and he discovers that for some reason, thousands of starfish have been washed ashore. They’re all over the beach, as far as the eye can see, and they’re all just lying there dying in the sun.

Next, he discovers a guy who is walking up and down the beach picking up the starfish one by one and throwing them back into the sea.

“Why do you bother?”, the first guy asks.

“That’s not going to make any difference.”

The other guy just looks at him for a second without saying a word. He bends down, picks up another starfish and throws it back into the sea.

Then he looks back up and says, “It made a difference to that one”.