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votes
What small thing made a big impact on you?
An offhand comment
A tiny detail
An incidental moment
Etc.
It wasn’t really a big deal, but, for whatever reason, it had a big impact on you.
What was it, and what was the impact? Tell us the story.
When I was younger and getting frustrated by something not working quite like I wanted, my dad offhandedly said "some mortal designed it, some other mortal built it, and you have the power to change how it works if you really care"
That mentality changed how I look at a lot of problems in my life. Yeah, he's right, most things are not that complicated when you break them open and start looking at the guts. It might not be worth it to make everything function like I expect, but it is almost always possible to change.
This applies to vehicles, house maintenance, toys, even random computer programs. Chop them up, take the parts you want, reassemble them as you need to solve your problem.
This is a little long-winded, so bear with me. I was in grade 2 or 3, so maybe 8-9 years old, when the class went on a day trip to a castle/museum. I grew up in Romania until I was about 15, so if anyone reading wants the exact location, look up Peles Castle. A popular trip for kids in school at least back then. Would have been the early 90s. I had very little pocket cash. Family was not wealthy. A classmate, Georgiana, was from a wealthier family, and I was friends with her. Many kids were using their pocket cash to buys random crap from the street vendors. I gave what little cash I had to a beggar, an old woman in black. Many kids were buying sunglasses - not sure why, I guess we thought they were cool. So I borrowed some cash from this girl. This is the "small thing" because I was getting a bit of cash when I got a good grade in school, which was pretty often. I told her I'll have the cash pretty soon.
Skip ahead a week or so, and I guess there were no assignments or grades in school, so no cash. She was getting annoyed. One day leaving school, the lady picking her up (relative? Sitter?) approached me and the lady picking me up from school (this was a common thing beucase parents were at work), and explained the situation. My "guardian" paid. It was very little money, again "SMALL THING". Think $5-10. Problem was, my parents didn't know of any of this - until now. So my guardian tells my parents because she needs to get reimbursed. BUSTED!
Ok, so, once again, maybe until now it's still a small thing. My parents maybe should have said "you should have let us know, it's only $5, doesn't matter, just let us know sooner next time and don't hide things like that from us." Nah. Instead, my dad is furious. He asks to see the sunglasses which I was hiding in a drawer. He crushes the cheap plastic sunglasses with his bare hands, and I forget what he actually says to me, but I am guessing some other "punishment" like no cartoons for a week or something. I don't know. I was shocked by his reaction. Felt disproportional, and left a mark. That's how this "small thing" turned into a big impact.
The impact was that the occurrence, the experience with my dad, his reaction to it, made me decide I need to be independent. I cannot depend on others and take chances. Can't borrow money if I don't have the money to pay up right away. Can't trust my dad to be on my side either. Can only trust myself and don't leave myself exposed or open to being caught. If I lie or hide something, do it perfectly and forever. Maybe it was a good lesson to learn early? Maybe it contributed to a poor relationship with my dad for many years to come? Hard to say. Either way, there you go, what to me was a small $5 non-problem turned to be an impactful experience.
I have an "overreacting dad" small-thing story, too.
I was probably 12 or 13 years old (or in that ballpark), and my parents were having a garage sale. I had a bunch of toys that both me and my younger brother had aged out of, and my parents let me set up my own "booth" in the garage where I would get to keep any of the money from selling those toys. They let me figure out fair prices for each of the toys and put stickers on them.
At some point the dad of some younger kids down the street asked me if I could go any lower on some of the toys--I think he wanted to buy some Fisher Price binoculars plus a couple other things, which would have come out to around $10 total based on sticker prices, and he said he would give me $5 for all of it together. I tried to haggle up but he wouldn't budge, so I said if I don't sell any of that stuff he can have it for that price at the end of the day. He said fine, and to bring it to his house later (he lived like 3 houses away from ours) if I change my mind.
Well the garage sale wrapped up that afternoon, and I still hadn't sold the stuff the guy wanted, so I threw it into my wagon and wheeled it over to his house and rang the doorbell. When he answered I said he could have the stuff for $5, and he said now his offer was only $4. I didn't think it was a huge deal--better to get some money instead of be stuck with these baby toys, so I took it.
Well, that night my dad mentioned he saw me wheel some stuff to the neighbor while they were putting away everything from the garage sale and asked what was up with that. I told him about all the stuff I sold for $4, and my dad went nuts, calling me a sucker, telling me I got ripped off, and I shouldn't be so naive. In hindsight he was probably more mad at the other dad than me, but man did that ever sting. I cried myself to sleep that night, vowing to never be taken advantage of ever again. So even to this day that "lesson" sticks with me, and I am extremely stubborn and hard to budge in situations where I think someone is trying to wheel-and-deal me, probably losing out on deals that I really should have taken, just to uphold my principles.
Thanks for sharing the story! As an adult I try not to judge my father too harshly as I know there is no manual for life. Some of the lessons, even though they were received in a harsh way, may have their benefit later. In your case, sure, maybe you lose out on some deals, but likely you gain more overall by sticking to your principles. For me, the lesson ended up influencing how I see loans and money I don’t actually have, which is likely a good thing. I’m very much opposed to taking out a loan unless absolutely necessary, but it can backfire as sometimes you can be strategic and use loans to your advantage as long as you know you can pay them off. All that aside, I do wish the delivery of said lessons was a little smoother. One comment here talks about the grandfather saying “you look nicer in more colorful clothing” rather than “you look awful in dark clothing”. A few words different, a milder tone, and the feedback can be more constructive and less negative on the relationship. I reconciled with my dad, but not until my late 30s, not fully anyway. That’s a long time of a relationship that could have been more positive. Of course it wasn’t just this incident, there were many others.
I was watching a random tech YouTuber as a way to immerse in the target language I'm studying, and he happened to have a video on weight loss (context: I am overweight and always struggled with losing it). I decided on a whim to watch it just to get some more listening immersion in, not really expecting to take much away from it because I've gone through the weight loss/gain cycle too many times before already.
Then, somewhere in the video, he said something to the likes of "To the people who will inevitably ask about what to do when they lose enough weight and stop their diet and gain it all back: why would you stop? Skinny people eat less food. Fat people eat more food. If you want to stay skinny, you have keep eating less food forever."
There was a lot more context surrounding this and the whole video was about intermittent fasting and how to do it in a healthy way, but this one small bit really hit me for some reason.
I always understood that yes, dieting shouldn't be about a specific food regimen but about creating healthy habits you can maintain. But there was always this notion that the goal was to restrict myself until I hit an arbitrary milestone (reach X weight), and once I get to that milestone I can ease up. But that's exactly the mentality that leads to weight gain, and also the mentality that leads me to quit early. If I constantly feel like I'm going through a challenge to get to a goal, that challenge becomes way harder and more stressful. And once I do reach the goal I'm not going to want to go back to the challenge.
So now I've actually started losing weight (with the intermittent fasting method, which I found did wonders for my mental health and stress with food. I'm actually baffled at how well I've adapted to it and how easy it is to maintain.) and losing that notion that I'm just restricting myself to get to a goal is now gone. I am now implementing a change that I want to maintain for the rest of my life, this is the new me, and the new me feels great.
I totally get that. And you look back and it seems like the most obvious thing, doesn't it? Diet culture has really hurt a lot of people and most people don't have a clue.
Indeed. I always heard that dieting is about creating healthy habits, and that's a nice way to put it and is indeed what you technically have to do, but to me at least it doesn't carry to weight and gravity of the word "forever." Saying I have to be on a diet feels like being told I have to go on this side quest to get to a goal that's then separate from this "diet."
That's really what clicked in my brain, I think. I have to stop eating as much forever. I have to eat healthy forever. There's no challenge to overcome, just a permanent change I need to make and stick with forever. People who don't put on weight eat less, so why am I thinking that I would be different?
Yes you have to be in a calorie deficit to actually lose weight, and that is technically an irregular and temporary change, but as you stick to that calorie deficit, eventually the calories you're consuming just become your normal caloric intake that you should maintain forever. You don't "ease up" and eat a bit more once you reach your target weight, you can only stay skinny if you maintain the habits of a skinny person, and those habits are, broadly, to eat less food.
I had that same realization.
For me the only thing that worked was counting calories. And eventually I realized I didn't have to restrict my calories just to lose weight and then stop.
I had to find what weight I wanted to be, then figure out how many calories a day to maintain that weight. In theory, if I knew that number, I could just start eating that amount, at any weight. Since heavier people burn more calories. Eventually my weight would automatically adjust to the goal weight.
In reality it took a few years of counting and weighing for me to actually find those numbers. Precision calorie counting doesn't seem possible. But the realization that there is no point at all to a temporary diet was key. Instead I only try to find healthy eating habits that I can maintain forever and start doing them right away as if I'm already at my goal weight.
I told a person I looked up to that I didn't like math, because I was indoctrinated into believing people shouldn't like math. He replied with the best advice I've ever gotten.
"You should learn to enjoy the things you're good at"
I used to think about these things all the time. How I could trace my circumstances back to one little event or decision. Sadly, I can't remember any of those from my early 20s. Either I was placing too much importance on the little things, or I'm just getting old. 🦞 "Why not both?" 🦞 Seems like my brain is too full of 15 year old memes to remember critical details of my life.
There is one thing that might apply: my high school buddy's wedding date. I've never been married, so forgive me if I'm not placing enough importance on the date, but then again, I wasn't the one getting married. I think it counts.
What's so important about this wedding date? Well, for starters, it was March 14, 2020. If you haven't blocked that period out of your mind, that's the day everything shut down in the US. I was living in Beijing at the time, and they had shut things down in late January. Like most people, I thought it was going to last a few weeks, maybe a month or two tops. It was actually important for me to be at the wedding, so I figured I'd skip the quarantine and hang out with my friends and family until the big day. I thought I was slick getting myself some extra vacation. Obviously, it didn't go the way I expected. Things got out of hand, and I wasnt able to make it back to the life I was building. I ended up meeting someone, moved in with her, got a job, and by the time I could go back to China, I had a new life. Had their wedding date been set for May or June, I wouldn't have left and the last six years would have been completely different for me.
In high school I had started going “goth-lite” with dark baggy clothes and mildly obscene slogans on shirts etc. for maybe 9th and 10th grade.
One day, my grandpa, who would be up for the summer, was washing his car (which happened every other day) in his very high waisted white shorts and yellow polo, nonchalantly said “I think you look better in brighter colors” as I walked by.
I can’t really remember if it immediately hit me, or it happened over like a month, but I basically switched my whole persona before school started in the fall again. I wasn’t wearing my grandpas clothes or anything, but just normal jeans and positive slogans (or really, absence of graphics on tees). I really started to switch from “kid with some like friends” to “kid that sort of knows everybody and gets along with everybody”.
And I think about that moment probably every week. I had good grandparents and I’m sure I was just impacted by his perception of me. But I’m surprised at the degree of it.
Good grandpa. There's no way he could have predicted that would be the thing that changed your outlook and maybe your whole life.
This kind of think terrifies me as a parent. How do I know that some casual comment I make doesn't have the opposite lifelong negative affect? I try but I also know surely I must also sometimes fail.
I got a couple
When I was a teenager I was camping and while I was making some food with one of those camping boil in a bag things, an adult said to me "don't tear off the top all the way, because then you only have 1 piece of rubbish to take home instead of 2!"
And for some reason this really mediocre advice stuck with me and I find myself not tearing the tops the whole way off packets even in the house. And I stop myself like "why?".
Second was when I was really young. I remember my dad let me sit on his lap and play with the controls of a digger he had. He said "you can do what you want, just don't press that one" and being a young, little ass hole I immediately did the thing he said not to do. And he wasn't mad, he just looked so done and he quietly stepped out then went home. It made me feel so bad I made a point not to be like that as a kid (or adult).
What did the button do?
He'd Russian doll'd a couple of buckets inside each other for transport, so it was "don't push the joystick this way" to open the bucket. So it dropped them all on the ground and he had to come back the next day and put them all back.
I posted a slightly similar question about the butterfly effect a while back, which may have some responses to this.
I love questions like this, thank you for asking!
I've talked about it on Tildes many times before because it literally changed my life: how I started using ADHD meds.
I was already kinda aware that smoking pot gave me a lot more focus, but the tipping point came after another night of partying. Usually, every time I smoked weed, I never used my car. I slept where I took it and never tried to drive while high, like come on, that's obvious. Keep in mind, I also only smoked pot with my friends, so it was always a social event/party for me to smoke weed.
Well, I had been doing that (sleeping there) for 2 years at that point (only had a car in my late 20s), and one particular day, I really felt like I wanted to sleep at home. I knew the drive from my homie by heart, as I had gone there like 50 times in 3 years. So that late evening, I thought, fuck it, I'm good enough to drive, took my keys and drove home at midnight, still a little high from the evening.
I was LASER focused. Was aware of any small disturbances in the road, where every car around me was...all the way up to my home.
That following week, it really fucked me up. Why was I a better driver? Should I smoke weed everyday now? It took a little time connecting all the dots, but that was the starting point that made me research seriously about getting diagnosed for ADHD. Got the diagnosis 4 months later, on meds 3 months after that, and now, very happy with the results :)
It's crazy that an allegedly bad decision (DUI) actually made me realize that my body needed something for concentration.
My kid is pretty small, and they've made a big impact on me.
My niece is small too and she's made an impact on me too. I love being the cool uncle but she's also given me a push to be healthier and start losing weight.
Is being a teacher having a kid as cool as it sounds to me? Like, you're subject matter expert and major stake holder rolled into one
Honestly it can be exhausting! I use up a lot of my social/emotional battery through the day and it is really hard sometimes to come home and still have to be "switched on". I like the days we have to ourselves the most though - I love hanging out with him and seeing the way my kid's mind is changing and growing.
One thing that doesn't seem to be unique among teachers... We often don't take our own advice when it comes to practicing work at home! I've spoken to numerous other educators with kids - of course we provide opportunities for their growth, read with them, etc, but we all seem to slack a bit about practicing things like sight words.
Fortunately for my son it doesn't seem to affect him much - he recently scored 99th percentile on his MAP testing and 86th percentile for reading. I don't think I need to worry much!
.... And also now I have to do e learning with my class as well as my kid! Wooo!
The learning-est of us all!
Someone here made a half-serious comment that crimes on public transit and crowded areas should be prosecuted more harshly because more people are indirectly affected. Yelling "fire!" in a crowded theatre is a crime, so there's precedent too.
It made me rethink how I evaluate and explain the social impact of different crimes.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you feel that crimes like homicide are weighted less because they impact fewer people?
No, mostly referring to nuisance crimes, but violent crime is relevant too. When crimes affect more people, they should be treated more seriously.
Blasting loud music from an apartment is a nuisance to a few neighbours, and it's a crime in many places. It's also a crime on public transit, but it's less enforced despite affecting far more people.
In the case of a murder, killing someone at home might traumatize a family or neighbours. Killing the bus driver will probably traumatize far more passengers and bystanders.
Fishing with my Popop in Wyoming, just down the stream from the Cabin there in Story. He taught me that we needed to be quiet and patient to catch the fish. His advice worked, and we ate Rainbow Trout for lunch.
That patience lesson has reoccurred in my mental theater hundreds of thousands of times, and while I do sometimes lose my patience, the good ole fish definitely comes when I don't .
This won't be a long story, mostly because I've forgotten the details, but it's actually something that I think had a major effect on my overall personality.
Some time in my Junior year in high school, I had a particularly bad time with my father in the morning and I arrived to my first class late and an emotional wreck, so much that I broke down crying in the middle of class and had to leave. Two students who were taking the class came out and checked in on me, listened to my story, and commiserated with me.
That's the whole story. I don't even know who they were. I might have known who they were but I had too many tears to even see them. They couldn't save me from the hell that I was living in - my childhood was the worst period in my life by miles and miles - but they listened and that was a great source of comfort. I didn't have a lot of friends at the time so maybe the fact that they were practically strangers actually made their attempt at comforting more impactful.
It ended up teaching me the power of compassion. I was a very misanthropic kid, and if this didn't happen to me the chance I would have become a libertarian and fall to the right would have been significantly higher. If someone's having a bad time, you don't have to know who they are to have a huge impact in their life. Just being there for someone can have a huge effect on someone's life. And now I strive to be that person.
Now that I think about it, I think being nice to someone I dated who was having a bad day is probably the reason why I ended up marrying them....
A foster kid yelling "I'M TRYING" at me. Years ago we had a foster kid I'll call B. B and his siblings had lived through some truly horrific abuse. He was practically incapable of regulating his emotions, and even then the only emotion he really knew was anger. It took nothing to set that off, even the most minor of thing would send him into a fit for 10 ~ 30min at a time - hitting anyone, breaking toys, making holes in walls, etc. as that is all he had even known or seen out of the adults in his life. He was by far the hardest child we have ever had in our home.
I don't remember what set him off this time, but I do remember it was minor and not really his fault. I managed to get him to his room before he went fully ballistic, and in an exacerbated sigh I said 'B just calm down'
"I'M TRYING"
The shock of him yelling that and not his usual string of swear words at me snapped me to attention, and god dam he was right. I cant even describe it, but you could just see he really was trying to calm himself down - something he had been talking about in therapy but had never done in practice. His anger this time wasn't at whatever had just happened, it was at himself, while trying so very hard to do something he had never done before. Ever since then anytime I'm met with strong emotions from a child I hear that same yell, slow myself down and pay attention. It has helped me catch things I would have 100% missed before B came into our home.
Swiping right on a girl I thought was cute on Tinder 10+ years ago. Changed the entire trajectory of my life for the better.
This one small action led me to:
Coming up on our 8th wedding anniversary soon and it's amazing to think how unrecognizable my life would be if one of us had just swiped left.
Your two swipe rights are the two halves of a pair of fluttery wings that synchronized into your own butterfly effect
The one sermon that stuck with me from my young days as a church goer was one that I later learned wasn't religious in origin: the Tale of the Starfish Thrower (shorter, more direct adaptation). I'm not sure how commonly known this one is, but it seems to get around.
I was young when I heard the story, and it helped me deal with some questions I had about how I treated living things. I'd always been very soft towards animals, but sometimes I felt too embarrassed to do something I wanted to do, like stop and move a worm off the sidewalk. Like someone would see and pick on me for it, or think it was foolish to save one when a hundred more were after it.
This story landed the first time I heard it. It didn't change how I felt living things should be treated, but it gave me conviction. It helped me see that it isn't foolish to help one in a million, and shaped a part of who I am now. And surely resulted in countless tiny critters being saved from certain doom.
I remember at some point in college I was watching a seminar or something similar by Bill Nye. It wasn't necessarily a science seminar to my recollection, but he said said something that resonated with me and changed my outlook on many interpersonal interactions.
"Everyone knows something you don't"
If you try to approach every interpersonal interaction with this ideal, you can always learn something new.
Twenty-some-odd years ago I was in my first job out of college. Off on a business trip with my boss down in San Diego. After work one day he wanted to go visit his kid at the University of San Diego. I wasn't doing anything so I went with him. While walking through campus I managed to meet eyes with a young woman walking the other direction. She smiled at me. That doesn't happen. That never happens. In terms of appearance I'm like Sloth from the Goonies, but with a fraction of the charisma. So like the topic says, it was a small thing, but it stuck with me ever since then.
In my first real job, my boss gave me a container of q-tips, labeled with "QTIP: Quit Taking It Personally". That helped reorient me into a more stoic approach to work which has benefited me ever since