I was walking down the Oakland sidewalk, returning from my lunch, when I saw from a distance, a tall black man in a black hoody sprint across the sidewalk towards the street. In a flash, he reached down and yanked a young girl, mere moments before she would have stepped into the path of a huge city bus barreling down the road. The man calmly walked back to his original place, standing by the public telephone. I went up to him, looked him in the eye, shook his hand, and said, “What you just did was very kind. Thank you.” He shook my hand, and responded humbly, “I have little sisters…” To which, I continued to shake his hand and said, “Thank you.”
As I walked away, I immediately burst into tears. This man had just saved the life of a child and he appeared to think nothing of it. To me, he was a godsend. He had risked his life in the blink of an eye to save that of a complete stranger. To himself, he was normal. He shrugged as if what he had done were as simple of an act as holding the door open.
Why is it that it is so easy for us to see heroes in others and not in ourselves?
This story hits me particularly hard as I have spent the last few days trying to understand what people keep telling me: I am the strongest asset to my company.
My entire focus on building iFeelio has been to build a tool that people trust. One that is completely private and structured in a way that people who use it will just automatically get it.
So when I receive positive feedback from people, and they say that iFeelio has changed their life, and they thank me personally, I don’t know how to respond. I imagine my response is similar to the young man on the street: I shrug my shoulders and say, “I mean, it’s a really simple app, and I just built it for myself.”
How would things be different if I accepted that I, not the tool that I built, had tremendous power to impact people’s lives?
I have always believed that iFeelio had the power to save people’s lives, and now I realize that iFeelio is not saving lives, I am.