Think about the person who changed the direction of your life.
Maybe it was a teacher who said something offhand after class or a mentor who asked the one question nobody else had thought to ask. It could have been a stranger at a conference who told you the truth about something you’d been avoiding or a colleague who saw something in you before you saw it in yourself.
Now ask yourself this: do you think they know what they did?
Probably not. The moment that rewired something in you was, in all likelihood, unremarkable to them. They were doing what they always do. Showing up, paying attention, saying the thing that seemed obvious. They went home that day and made dinner and didn’t think about that conversation again.
And yet here you are.
The Asymmetry Nobody Talks About
Sparking Greatness ends with a call to action: go light the fire. It’s an invitation to share your story, to show up with intention, to be the kind of person whose presence opens something up in others.
But there’s a dimension of that invitation that I’ve been sitting with lately, and it’s this: you almost never get to know when it works.
Inspiration is profoundly asymmetrical. The impact lands on one side of the equation and the awareness stays on the other. The person transformed carries the moment forward. The person who sparked it moves on, usually without a second thought, often without any indication that anything significant occurred. They rarely get the phone call. They rarely get the email years later that begins, “I don’t know if you remember me, but something you said…”
Most of the time, they just never find out.
I think about this in the context of leadership constantly. The CEOs and senior leaders I work with are in rooms every single day where something they say or do or choose not to do lands on someone else in ways they will never fully track. A comment in a meeting. The way they handle a hard conversation. Whether they tell the truth when it would be easier to hedge. Whether they stay curious when they could get defensive.
None of those moments feel like transformation, because they feel like just another Tuesday.
What We Do With the Ordinary Moments
Here is the thing about ordinary moments: they are the only moments we actually have.
We do not get a curated highlight reel (though we can choose to create them in hindsight). We do not get to flag the interactions that count and phone in the ones that don’t. The person whose career you change with one honest observation doesn’t announce themselves in advance. The team member who watches how you handle a crisis and decides, based on what they see, what kind of leader they want to become, doesn’t send a calendar invite.
It just happens. In the middle of everything else.
The leaders who consistently spark something in others are not necessarily the most charismatic or the most accomplished. They are the ones who are genuinely, fully there and who treat each conversation as if it might matter, because it might.
The Phone Call You Might Never Get
When I think about those moments for me, I think back to fifteen years ago whenI had a terrible boss. She was undermining, unkind, unforgiving, and unrelenting. But you know what she wasn’t? Unpredictable. The company had assigned me a mentor and we were debriefing the latest instance of when she’d undermined me in a meeting. He looked me square in the eye and told me the problem wasn’t her, it was me. I was stunned. He said that love her or hate her, she always acted exactly the same, said the same things, behaved in the same way, and every time, I chose to take the bait. It was a painful but invaluable lesson for me: I can’t control how others behave but I can control how I react and engage with them. I doubt he remembers that moment. It was just Gil being Gil, telling the hard truth even when people didn’t want to hear it. (And as a result of this newsletter, I’m planning on writing him a note to tell him about his impact).
A few years ago I received one of those emails. Someone I had worked with briefly, years earlier, wrote to tell me that something I said in a session had stuck with her, that she had carried it through a significant transition in her life and that she still thought about it.
I had no memory of saying it.
Not because it wasn’t real to her. It clearly was. But because in that moment, I was just doing what I always try to do. Paying attention. Asking the next question. I wasn’t aware that anything significant was happening. I was just there.
That email was a gift, and I know it. Most people never get one. Many of the moments that matter most to the people around us are filed somewhere in their interior lives, unspoken and unreported, shaping the way they lead and love and make decisions for years. We are influencing each other constantly, invisibly, without a scoreboard.
So that means the question is never really whether you’re having an impact. You are. The only question is what kind.
The Invitation
Sparking Greatness closes with the idea that you have a story worth telling, and that telling it has the power to change things for the people who hear it. That’s true, but it’s even bigger.
You don’t only spark people with your stories. You spark them with your choices, with the way you handle what’s hard, with whether you stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable and with the quality of attention you bring to the person sitting across from you.
You are lighting fires all the time. In meetings and hallways and conversations that feel routine, and in the moments you’ll forget by Friday. Someone else won’t.
The most important thing you do today probably won’t feel important at all. But someone may carry it home, carry it forward, and it will matter long after you’ve forgotten you said it.
You are already someone’s spark.
That’s the gift. Don’t leave it on the table.