At the beginning of August I changed the pinned Tweet on my personal Twitter account to reflect the road trip move my husband and I made, and today I got to change it back. I’m not one for memorizing quotes, but this is probably one of the few I can still recite from memory. It’s from an article by Mikey Neumann that came out in 2016, and it has been my pinned tweet since the moment I read the article.
Before we continue, I encourage you to take a moment to go read the article for yourself here: http://wilwheaton.net/2016/02/good-enough/
If it isn’t evident after reading it what the quote is, I’ll pull it for you.
Be creative.
Mikey Neumann (February 2016)
Be valuable.
Spread joy for no other reason than to spread it.
Leave the world a better place than the one you woke up into this morning.
I almost put this on one of my bulletin boards in my classrooms! I’m sure my students would love to know I was quoting a videogame-developer-turned-YouTube-professional. At the time I was working in a position that did not allow for a lot of creativity, so I focused on the latter three statements. Once I was able to teach, I focused on all four.
Now that I’m looking for the next step in my career, I’m drawn back to this quote. What position would allow me to be creative and spread joy? How can I be valuable when I want to prioritize keeping myself and my husband healthy? What did I do today to leave the world a better place?
Usually I’d see Mikey next week at PAX, he’d buy pizza for the entire Sheraton lobby, and everyone would stay up far too late (for the first week of school) to learn more about how games make us empathetic and bring us together. Not that we say that explicitly, but it’s how we ended up in that lobby in the first place. Without that lobby this year, we’ll find new ways to make our corner of the world a better place.
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