Why I Keep Blogging When It Seems No One Is Paying Attention

I had the incredible honor of being able to pass on some life wisdom to the 2019 graduating class of Carol Morgan School in the Dominican Republic last week.

To be precise, I wasn’t physically there, and the words they heard did not flow directly from my mouth. They emanated from the lips of Distinguished Alumnus Miguel “Mike” Viyella ‘74, the Commencement Speaker.

Here’s the story, briefly. Mike and I attended Carol Morgan together from 4^th through the 9^th grades. We lost touch after my family left the Dominican Republic in 1972, but last October we reunited in Miami with three other classmates. At the time, Mike asked the group, “If there were some type of time machine that would allow you to give some advice to your younger self, what would it be?”

We had fun with that line of thought for a few minutes before moving on to something else. But the question stayed with me, and I went home and wrote this blog post: Letter to My Younger Self.

Last night, I received an email from Mike telling me that he had quoted my post extensively in his graduation address (and gave me full credit, of course). I was stunned and incredibly honored that my words made enough of an impact on him that he saw fit to use them for such an important occasion. (In fact, in my reply I broke my own longstanding rule against using more than one exclamation point in a single email!)

Set aside the fact that exactly zero of the people who knew me back in the days when I attended school there would have predicted that I would have any input at all in a future graduation speech—what made an impression on me is that something I wrote had enough of a ripple effect that it may actually make a difference in someone’s life, however far removed they are from me.

I’m not naïve. I know the vast majority of those graduating seniors forgot every word of Mike’s speech by the end of the party they went to that night—but you never know.

THAT is the best reason to keep blogging, even when it seems no one is paying attention. It’s not the number of page views or retweets or likes; it’s not even whether my “thought leadership” gets publicity for my business. If something I write helps someone learn something new, think a little differently about something, or motivate just one little change—that is good enough for me.