Making a Positive Impact (By Ethan)

How do YOU define a positive impact? For me, it means making the community around you a better place for all living things in it, like picking up trash/recycling more, helping the homeless, planting extra trees, and more! Even if it isn’t on the scale of saving the planet, it will still go a long way.

            Did you know that the word “team” is an acronym? It stands for TOGETHER EVERYONE ACHIEVES MORE. This is entirely true if you are helping to put a good footprint in your community, city, etc. One can do the minor things, but a hundred minor things turn into a major one. In the words of Helen Keller,

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”

For quite a few years, every time I had a birthday party, instead of having the guests bring gifts, I would ask them to contribute the gift money to the charity organization A Life A Time, dedicated to helping children with medical problems in the more impoverished areas of China. Every party, we helped one specific child to do surgery or fit him with prosthetic limbs. In this manner, me and the guests, as a team, helped make the lives of five children many times better.

We as humans have enough problems on our own, but think about the environment! We litter, pollute, and treat Mother Nature like a lump of mud in our “perfectly clean” lives. I have already stopped using plastic straws after hearing of a sea turtle getting one stuck in its nose. Even an act as small as reducing the use of plastics can make our world a better place.

Attitude plays an important role in this sort of stuff. If your attitude says that you don’t care, it will hold you back from making that needed positive change. I believe it can even affect the country you live in, because attitude is contagious. It can spread like the stealthiest germ, across towns, states, and later, nations.

Making the changes yourself is hard for starters, but inspiring others is even more challenging. Each and every person has different beliefs, strengths, weaknesses, ifs, buts, and what ifs. I believe the person who is a great leader is the person who can spread their ideas. With persistence, eventually, people will listen to your ideas.

We are like magnets, and if we have the potential to attract positive things, then our friends might feel our magnetic field and attract positive things as well.