When I started writing this newsletter, I thought I’d be writing about careers.

Leadership. Management. The world I had spent two decades inside of.

And that is what the early issues were.

But as it turns out, when you do something long enough, week after week, something happens that you did not plan and could not have planned. The work starts to evolve on its own. You end up following it more than steering it.

Somewhere in the last hundred-some Mondays, this stopped being a newsletter about work.

It became a place where anyone from any walk of life can land and find one person's personal revelations that helped him on his journey, in the hopes that one might help you on yours.

That is what this is now. And I like it a great deal better.

A Positive Force Gone

This week we lost Dolly Parton. She was eighty.

Every so often someone passes and it lands harder than you expect. This one did that for me, and I spent a good part of the week trying to work out why.

I never met her. I am not sure I would even call myself a fan the way real fans are fans.

But I admired her, and I have for a long time, and it took until this week for me to be able to say what for.

Some people find a way to live such that when they are gone, the world feels dimmer. A positive force that was reliably out there, doing its thing, is now not.

And here is the part I keep turning over. In all these years I have never heard one person say a bad word about that woman.

Consider the level of fame she carried, and for how many decades, and how many rooms she walked through, and how many people worked alongside her. And sit with that for a second.

Dolly Country

A few years back I took one of my drives and ended up in the Smokies.

That is Dolly country. Sevier County, Tennessee, is where she was born, into a family that had almost nothing, and you can feel her in those towns when you drive through them.

Dollywood sits in Pigeon Forge, which without it would be just another small mountain town. She could have put that park anywhere in this country. She put it in the hills she came out of, and it brought work and visitors and money into the place that raised her.

Then I learned about the books.

Her father could not read or write, and he was embarrassed about it his whole life. So she started the Imagination Library, which mails a free book every month to any registered child, from the day they are born until the day they turn five. It sends out millions of books a month. It has sent out hundreds of millions by now, all over the world.

Her father lived long enough to watch it grow. What he loved most, she said, was that the children started calling her the book lady. He thought that was the grandest thing in the world.

No Complaining

I went looking this week. Read more about her, watched a lot of old clips. Two things stood out.

The first is from the set of Steel Magnolias in 1989. Julia Roberts has told this story a number of times, most memorably to Oprah.

They were filming in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Over a hundred degrees. Heavy wigs, wool clothing, long days. And Dolly never said a word about it.

Roberts finally turned to her on the porch and pushed her on it. Come on. Say it. This is miserable.

And Dolly said: "When I was a little girl, I wanted to be famous, and I wanted to be rich, and now I'm both of these things, I'm not going to complain about it."

Roberts said she has never forgotten it. I understand why.

That is perspective. Not the kind that goes on a poster. The kind that holds up in hour eleven of a hundred-degree day, when nobody would have blamed her for cracking.

So the question I could not let go of is where consistent perspective like that actually comes from. Because that sort of steadiness has to be anchored to something. It does not show up on its own on a hard morning.

Lord, I Used Everything You Gave Me

Then I found the second thing.

She was asked how she wanted to be remembered. She did not have to think about it.

She said she wanted to be remembered as somebody good and somebody giving.

Then she reached for a saying she loved.

"When I stand before God, I want to be able to say, Lord, I used everything you gave me."

That is it. That is the whole thing.

She had settled that question long before anyone thought to ask it. And once a person settles it, most of the daily decisions stop needing to be decided.

The heat on that set is not a hardship. It is the price of the exact life she asked for.

Judging other people is not her assignment. She said it plainly. "I don't condemn or criticize. I just accept and love."

And when people spent forty years trying to get her to pick a political side, the answer never moved. "I'm not in politics, I'm an entertainer."

You can read that as avoidance if you want to. I read it as a woman who knew exactly what her work was and would not be talked out of it by anybody.

That is a North Star. It is not a goal, because goals get hit and replaced. It is the fixed point that everything else gets checked against.

The North Star

Mine is not worded as beautifully as hers.

But it comes to the same place. I want to do the absolute most I can with what I was given. I want to leave the greatest impact on this world that I am capable of leaving. I want to live to my potential instead of near it.

That is why I write on Sunday mornings when there are a hundred other things on the list. It checks out against the star.

I do not know what yours is. You may not have said it out loud yet, and there is no requirement that you say it out loud this week.

But I would bet you already sense it. Most people do. It sits there quietly and gets ignored, because naming it makes it real, and real means you have to start checking things against it.

Name it anyway.

Because the perspective everybody admires in someone like her is not something she was born holding. It is what is left over once you know what you are for.

Rest easy, Dolly. You used everything you were given, and the whole world got the benefit of it.

With Absolute Sincerity,

Ed Clementi,

Founder & CEO of Inspired Fire, LLC

Make an Impact and Feel an Impact!