The Job Is Usually the Thing Right in Front of You

I want to say this carefully, because I do not want it to sound small.

A mission is not always somewhere else. Most of the ones I have watched people actually complete were about four feet away from where they were already standing.

The brother who needed somebody to sit with him. The neighbour nobody visits. The kid at school that everybody has quietly agreed to leave alone. The grandparent with the stories and nobody asking.

Those are not the warm-up for the real thing. In my experience they are usually the real thing.

I have sat with a great many people near the end of their lives, and I have never once heard somebody wish they had been given a bigger assignment. I have heard plenty wish they had noticed the one in the room.

You do not need permission and you do not need a title. Almost nothing important that I have watched get done was done by somebody who had been officially put in charge of it.

The important thing is probably in your house or your street already, and it has been waiting for somebody to look directly at it.