"You never know whose worst day your words will arrive on. So write like every single moment in your message maters. Because they do." - Futurist Jim Carroll
Part 5 of my short 6-part series revisiting my archives. Rereading years of morning posts while writing my newest book, I kept thinking less about what I wrote - and more about who was reading. Today's post is about you.
Something strange happens when you put a thought into the world every single morning.
Most days, it lands quietly. A few likes, a few shares, and the world moves on. You start to wonder if anyone's really out there.
And then, every so often, a message arrives. Someone I've never met writes to tell me that a quote showed up on exactly the day they needed it. The morning of the layoff. The week the business nearly went under. A stretch of their life they describe only vaguely, but you can hear the weight in the words.
Somehow, the right sentence that you wrote into your Daily Inspiration post found them on the right morning.
What might I have written that hit them at the right time? How about this one - it's landed hard for quite a few folks:
"At some moment in time, you transition from the shame of who you were into the pride of who you've become."
That's the line as I'd say it to you today, if you asked me. But it didn't arrive that way. It's actually a small family of posts, each one circling the same idea a little differently, over more than a year:
"At some moment in time, you will transition from regret for what you have not achieved, to pride for what you have actually accomplished!" (February 2022)
"At some moment in time, you will transition from the shame of your mistakes into pride for the lessons you've learned from them!" (March 2023)
"At some moment in time, you will come to realize that the future you thought had no longer exists!" (July 2023)
I didn't plan that as a series. I just kept returning to the same doorway, over and over, trying different keys. That's usually how the truest ideas surface - not in one clean sentence, but in the accumulated draft of a dozen almost-right ones.
Here's the humbling part: I never know which post it will be. The ones I labor over often sail past unnoticed. The ones I write in ten minutes, half-asleep - those are the ones that end up taped to someone's monitor. I've stopped trying to predict it.
There's a lesson in that for anyone who leads, writes, teaches, or manages: you are broadcasting on frequencies you cannot hear. That offhand encouragement in a hallway. That extra sentence in an email. Someone out there is having their worst day within earshot of your words - and you will almost never know which day, or which words.
So you have exactly one strategy available: make the words good. All of them. Every day. Write like it matters, speak like it matters - because on some morning you'll never be told about, to some person you'll never meet, it did.
That's not a burden. It's the best reason I know to keep showing up.