A Different Thought During Nobel Season

It is Nobel Peace Prize season.

I was reading about the winner, and it made me think about something slightly different.

We spend so much of our lives trying to become bigger.

Build a bigger company. Earn more. Have more influence. Reach more people. Have a bigger voice.

There is nothing wrong with any of that.

But I started wondering: does our purpose become bigger as our influence becomes bigger?

I went back and read about a few Nobel Peace Prize winners.

Wangari Maathai started by encouraging women in Kenya to plant trees in their communities.

Leymah Gbowee's women's peace movement in Liberia started in one community and eventually spread to communities across the country.

Kailash Satyarthi's story stayed with me the most. On his first day of school, at around five years old, he saw another child working outside and couldn't understand why that boy wasn't in school too. Later, he and a few friends started a football club and used the membership fees to help children who couldn't afford to go to school.

None of these started with extraordinary power.

They saw something that bothered them. They cared enough to do something about it. And what started small became much bigger.

The Nobel Peace Prize is certainly not a perfect measure of goodness, and its winners are not perfect people.

But perhaps its value is that, once a year, it reminds us to admire something other than accumulation.

It asks us to look at people who chose to put what they had, their time, courage, voice and eventually their influence, behind something beyond themselves.

And that made me wonder about those who already have extraordinary power and influence.

People who can move markets, shape technology, reach millions of people and sometimes influence governments.

Imagine what is possible when that kind of power is matched by an equally large sense of purpose.

Maybe that is what I find myself reflecting on this Nobel season.

It is not how big we become that matters most.

It is what becomes bigger within us as we do.