an email can change everything
You never know what it is you will do or say that will stick with someone forever.
Two weeks ago, I started a new role. I’m on our brand-new Concept Development team. My new task is to give form to inputs – to translate user tasks to functional products. It’s a bit of a change from leading project teams through an entire development cycle. I’m very excited.
This afternoon, I was recruiting volunteers for a quarterly event that we put on with MedShare. In the two years that we’ve worked with them, we’ve seen our partnership blossom in remarkable ways – from exceeding capacity at our first volunteer event, to breaking volunteer records for boxes packed and sorted, to spurring a Corporate-wide product partnership.
Volunteering at MedShare.
In a month and a half, when I sit down to reflect on the year I’ve had, I will think long and hard about product launch. I will remember switching teams – twice – and starting a new journey in concept development. I will remember countless hours sorting supplies for hospitals in the developing world, and the endless conversations with Corporate to build a product partnership with MedShare. It’s been a big year.
At any point in our lives, we are in medias res. In the middle of a thousand stories. And I’d like to share one of those with you tonight.
In August, I got an email from a coworker I didn’t know, with a situation I didn’t know what to do with. Her brother is in Ghana, in West Africa. They had tried, without success, to find a clinic dispensing medicine to treat his 5-year old daughter for malaria. They were running out of options, and she was reaching out, desperate for a contact at MedShare who might know something about donated product in the area. I passed along her information to my counterparts, feeling for her story, but wrapped up in my own in the final weeks before we got product out the door.
Launch paperwork. What I spent my August concerned with.
I didn’t take the time to follow up, and her story only crossed my mind once or twice since that day. But today, sitting outside the cafeteria, a striking woman with dark, curly hair came up and asked me, “Anu?”
I have been in hospital rooms to hear patients say thank you for the device you designed. I’ve been in ORs and ICUs, held hands and heard stories. But never have I been told that an email changed everything; that one small action, a forward, a connection, sparked a chain of events that saved a life.
The cardinal rule of writing well is that you shouldn’t write selfish posts. That you should give something back to the people who read your words. So let this be a reminder that you never know what it is that you will do or say, that might change everything. Our epiphanies are just as important as our chores. And every moment might be part of a little miracle.
