I believe the impact you have is the direct product of the decisions you make. It isn't given to you, it isn't discovered, and nobody awards it, which means the whole thing starts with you deciding, and then deciding again after that.
This show has been called Own Your Impact for a year and a half and I have never once sat down and said what the title actually means. Dolly Parton died this week, and the tributes filling up my feed are what finally made me do it. One of them, from a woman named Krista, listed the Grammys and the CMAs and the hits and then pointed out that at the end of a life like that, nobody talks about any of it. They talk about the kind of person you were. That's the first half of what I mean. The second half is more literal, and it's the one I don't say out loud nearly enough: I also mean actual ownership, building something that pays you for being exactly who you are and still belongs to you years from now. In this episode I use one decision Dolly made in 1974 to show why those two halves hold each other up, and why the second one usually costs something.
IMPACT POINTS FROM THIS EPISODE:
⚡ Impact isn't handed to you. You decide it, and then you keep deciding it. — It doesn't arrive because you got lucky or because somebody important finally noticed you. Every tribute I read this week was really a description of somebody who was recognizably the same person in every decision she made, in the songs, in the books she mailed to children, in the theme park she built in the county she came from. The money and the meaning went the same direction because they came out of the same set of choices.
⚡ Wanting the opportunity and accepting the terms are two different things. — In 1974 Elvis Presley wanted to record "I Will Always Love You," which was the largest amplification available to a person on the planet, and the night before the session his manager said Elvis takes half the publishing on anything he records. Dolly had been building publishing companies since the sixties specifically to hold onto her own songs. She said no, and she cried all night. Eighteen years later Whitney Houston recorded it and it paid Dolly for the rest of her life. A creator named Jamie Rachelle put the distinction better than I could: she wanted the opportunity, she just didn't want the terms.
⚡ A decision that hurts is not a decision you got wrong. — The crying is the part that usually gets edited out of stories like this one, and it's the part I want you to keep. She wasn't crying because she made a mistake. She was crying because she got it right and it still cost her something she badly wanted. Every real decision cuts something off, and the cutting is the only reason there is anything left in your hands afterward.
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