Shankar Vedantam

If you have a story or a question you would like to share with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty.

Email it to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

Use the subject line, invisible.

The drive to feel like we matter is deeply woven into the human psyche.

Gordon Flett is the author of The Psychology of Mattering, Understanding the Human Need to be Significant.

Gord, you say that a feeling of mattering can be deliberately cultivated.

Are you saying in some ways that we don't have to wait for the world to make us feel like we matter?

We can start to do it ourselves?

You say that one way we can begin to foster a sense of mattering is to reflect on all the ways in which we are already making an impact on the people around us.

Say more about this idea, Gord.

I want to spend a moment talking about how and why we lose track of what we have actually done for others and how we actually do matter to others.

I want to play you a clip from the 1995 film, Mr. Holland's Opus.

In that movie, Richard Dreyfuss plays a music teacher who is determined to write a great symphony.

He struggles to achieve this lofty goal, and toward the end of his life, he feels like he has failed.

At a gathering to commemorate his retirement, a former student of his takes the podium, and here's the clip of what the student tells him.

One of the things that has come up in this conversation that I think is worth flagging here is that, you know, mattering might be more a matter of quality rather than quantity.

And what I mean by that is you don't need necessarily, you know, 5 billion people to think that you're great.

for you to have your psychological needs met.

You might need one person.