Photo by Steven Pierson. Creative Commons 2.0.
In Alexandria, Indiana, hangs a strange piece of ever-evolving art: the world’s largest ball of paint. It began in 1977 when Mike Carmichael and his three-year-old son painted a baseball. How did that turn into the world’s largest ball of paint, you ask? They never stopped painting it. They got friends and neighbors to paint it. Eventually, they enlisted strangers who happened to be driving by to paint it. Each layer made the ball a little bigger. There are now over 25,000 layers of paint, and the ball is enormous, weighing in at over 2.5 tons.
This might seem like just another absurd roadside attraction, not unlike the world’s largest ball of twine or the world’s largest ball of popcorn, but, as John Green explains in this 3-minute YouTube video, there is a deeper meaning here. (If you’ve got a moment to watch the video, please pause reading here and do so. Otherwise, read on.)
Here’s the critical part of Green’s commentary:
“I think lots of us … worry that whatever our work is, it won’t matter because it won’t be remembered or because it won’t rise to the level of ‘genius.’ But maybe that makes individuals too important. Maybe, in the end, life and art are like the world’s largest ball of paint.
You carefully choose your colors, and then you add your layer as best you can, and then, eventually, it gets painted over. It gets painted again and again until there is no visible remnant of your layer of paint, and really no one knows about it except for you and maybe a few people close to you to whom you told the story. But that doesn’t mean your layer of paint is irrelevant because it permanently, if slightly, changed the larger sphere. …
Whether you made a YouTube video that only a few people saw or wrote a short story that only a few people read, you still played a role in shaping this many splendored ball of paint we’re all living with. So you add your coat of paint, or hopefully several coats, and hope that you’ve made the world more beautiful. And yes, eventually, you will be painted over, but you still matter.”
So the world’s largest ball of paint is really about legacy and contribution. Your legacy will probably not be like that of Marie Curie or Dr. King. But that’s okay. Your legacy will be another layer of contribution that, though invisible after it’s painted over, is still an integral part of the structure of the great ball of paint that is the human endeavor.
Maybe you’re …
A teacher, educating the next generation of citizens.
A grocery store clerk, making it possible for the rest of us to eat.
A conservationist, planting trees to make the forests of the future.
A nurse or doctor, helping restore people’s health.
A scientist, working on the next layer of knowledge.
A farmer, growing another season’s worth of food.
A coder, creating the next edition of some useful software.
A philosopher, giving us new bits of wisdom to use and build upon.
A business owner, adding value for customers, employees, and the economy as a whole.
An innovator, pushing our technologies one step further.
A parent, raising kids who will go on to add some paint of their own.
Or maybe you’re unemployed and stuck at home. What layer of paint can you add? Perhaps the answer is to paint yourself, metaphorically speaking, by building up your capacity to do even more once things go back to normal.
Whatever the case, you can always choose to do work that matters.
Forget Being Remembered
100 years from now, my work will be forgotten. Yours too, most likely. But the purpose of our work is not to be remembered. The purpose of our work is to make a contribution, however minor, to the human endeavor.
So go forth and add your layer of paint.