influence vs. impact
“Influence is temporary.
Impact is eternal.”
- Salehe Bembury
There’s been a lot of buzz around the sneakerhead community about the new Tyrese Haliburton shoe–partly because it’s a dope new shoe that is the result of a collaboration between Tyrese and Salehe Bembury, a talented designer recently tapped to be the Creative Director for Puma. Bembury’s shoes create their own buzz, but when you have the debut of a shoe the same day as the individual who the shoe was made for makes a game winning shot in the first game of the NBA Finals (after trailing the entire game), it takes that buzz to a whole new level.
My Instagram Story feed was filled with a lot of Salehe Bembury’s posts and in one of them he answered a fan’s questions–I can’t remember the exact question–with,
“Influence is temporary. Impact is eternal.”
As soon as I read it, I felt the power of the statement.
I then remembered that years ago I came up with a mission statement and condensed that statement down to one word– “impact”. You can read that old post here (heads up, I’m currently trying to update the WordPress plugin, so it might look funky when you get there). Another cool thing, which I didn’t remember until I reread the post, was at the end of the post I shared that I was starting a new series on the All About Your Benjamins podcast called, “The Pursuit” where I would be “spending more time exploring and sharing the connection between self-awareness, mindfulness, happiness, and purpose with money.” I think I found the beginning of the Pursuit that led me to where I am today—pretty cool.
Back to Bembury’s quote…
The focus for so many in today’s society is influence—ask a young person what they want to be when they grow up, and there’s a good chance they’ll tell you they want to be an influencer.
If you look at the popular “influencers,” even just the popular ones local to you, they rarely make an impact in the world, and their influence fades with time as they are replaced by someone else who has figured out how to garner attention.
Influence is temporary.
I’m sure there are situations where influence has led to an impact on the lives of some, but most of the time, influence is merely superficial and surface-level; the influence does not lead to the betterment of those being influenced.
But impact...impact is eternal.
When you impact someone’s life, you leave your mark, and since this is a positive-focused post, we’ll assume that mark is a positive one, as I know it’s possible to leave a negative impact on someone else.
An impact stays with you–I’m sure you can easily think of someone who impacted your life years ago; it’s eternal.
It’s exciting to see that the word I chose to summarize my mission statement over four years ago is just as true for me today as it was back then, even more so. I often remind my Self that my goal is to make an impact in the lives of those I come across, which helps me stay true to my authentic Self as I try to grow my reach.
If all I cared about was leveraging influence, my writing, podcasts, videos, and talks would look a lot different. And while I would love to see more people getting my Daily Notes, listening to the AlignedLife podcast, and reaching out to Santiago about working together, I’m pursuing quality over quantity, which could also be stated as impact over influence.
If you’re reading these Daily Notes, it’s highly likely that you are pursuing something that will help you make an impact on the world, and I want to encourage you to keep your focus on impact and try not to be pulled into the influence machine. You’ve got something meaningful to share, and pursuing influence over impact will only weaken it.
See you tomorrow and keep pursuing,
JC
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