No one will remember how many hours of overtime you worked. Or how many employees you had under your charge. But they will almost certainly remember if you made time when it was important to stay a little longer. If, on that day, you covered for that colleague who needed to leave half an hour early to pick up their sick child from school.
No one will remember your professional title, or even if your office door had any special decorations on it, or how many courses you attended, or how many lectures or articles you published in specialist magazines. But they will never forget if you treated your intern or your subordinates well, with dignity and without humiliation, rudeness, or worse... indifference.
No one, or very few people, will remember how many square meters your house was, how many bathrooms it had, whether the kitchen had a double-door refrigerator, or how many inches the giant screen in your dining room was, but they will certainly remember if they felt at home when you welcomed them one day. If you stayed with them one day to talk when they most needed someone to just listen to them.
The memory of the car you had may be kept alive by some of your friends, but most will only remember the color and make... Very few will remember the model, and almost no one will remember how many horsepower it had or the top speed you managed to reach. But they will surely remember if one day you pulled over to help them, or to give them a ride, when they were at the bus stop, on a stormy day, waiting for over half an hour, to give them a ride. was going home.
The status will eventually fade away. Ultimately, not even our name will be remembered in a few decades. The impact, on the other hand, is felt. And even if those who felt it don't know how to value it, something positive is created at that very moment.
In the end, people will remember who you were, not what you owned or achieved in life.
The words you said to them that morning, when they most needed to vent about the difficulties of life, in the five minutes before 8 a.m. Those words exchanged in front of the coffee machine, which initially were just about the weather and whether it would rain at the end of the week, but suddenly turned into a serious conversation that you had the courage to lead... Leaving behind other things that might have seemed more important.
Strive to be the best version of yourself, because there is no "second chance".
When you have someone or something in front of you, it is usually a unique event. It will never happen again. That person, in ten minutes' time, may not even be looking at you anymore, or may need help. In ten minutes, everything could change. And at that point, there is nothing you can do to turn back time. Never. Ever.
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