It started with a book.

Erin was deep into Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It by Jennifer Breheny Wallace. This is my kind of book, so it was an easy yes. What surprised me was how quickly I moved through it.

It was the first time I encountered the idea of mattering all in one place. Wallace frames it in the context of raising kids inside a high-achievement culture — but it hit me as a parent and as a person trying to figure out my own place in relation to the people and world around me.

Here's how she defines it: mattering is about feeling genuinely good in life, and it comes down to two equally important things — feeling valued and adding value. You feel valued when people appreciate you. You add value when you make a real difference. It operates across four domains: self, relationships, work, and community. And balance across all four actually matters. As Wallace puts it, "a life of complete sacrifice without any appreciation is unsustainable and frustrating for most of us" — and on the flip side, "a life of complete self-absorption is isolating at best, and harmful at worst."

Brené Brown's work brought shame and vulnerability into the mainstream American conversation, and belonging emerged as the cornerstone of real human connection. What I find interesting is how her research and Wallace's framework speak to each other. Brown's work essentially maps the emotional architecture that mattering depends on. She starts with this: "connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives." But she also noticed something uncomfortable — when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask about belonging, they tell you their most painful experiences of being left out. What lives underneath all of that is shame — the fear that if people really saw you, you wouldn't be worthy of connection. And Brown is clear that genuine belonging requires real presence: face-to-face, embodied, in the same room. Not performative. Not digital.

In this season of my life, I spend a lot of energy thinking about how to be the best version of myself. And honestly? It's exhausting. Better parent. Better wife. Better daughter. Better friend. But somewhere in the middle of this book, something shifted for me. I stopped centering my own world and started asking: what can I actually do to help the people around me feel like they matter?

And then I caught myself — because even that impulse circles back to me. Helping others feel valued ultimately helps me feel valued too. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

So here's the question I want to leave you with: if mattering genuinely matters to you, can you create a culture shift — in your home, in your neighborhood, in your local community — where people actually feel it? That's going to ask something of you. It requires respecting diversity, practicing real inclusion, and holding fairness as a value worth protecting. And adding value? That looks like empowering the people around you, honoring their autonomy, and supporting their sense of agency and self-determination in their own lives.

It starts small. It starts at home. But it's worth asking whether we can build something bigger.