May 2025
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from The Power of Mattering
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1 THE MATTERING INSTINCT
To be of importance to others is to be alive.
—T. S. ELIOT
I met Jane before her overnight shift at an underlit university library.1 She wore a warm smile and a weathered one-pocket custodial shirt.
For many years Jane had been the caretaker for a beloved family member. When he died, she felt purposeless. She had no job and a limited education. Faced with the prospect of homelessness, Jane took a cleaning position at the university where I do research, and volunteered for our study on how service workers experience meaning.2
Jane told me that during her first few shifts, she endured incessant negative thoughts like, Why couldn’t I have done something more with my life? and I wish I were more than just a janitor. ...
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I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.