I recently had the pleasure of traveling to Mountain View, California to attend “Take Your Parents to Work Day” at Google with my son, Jeremy. As a parent, when you think about great career opportunities and places you would be thrilled to see your kids work, it’s hard to beat Google.
In 2014, Fortune magazine along with others, voted Google once again, “the best company to work for”. As I toured the campus, amazing doesn’t even begin to describe what I saw. There is an abundance of food everywhere you turn from gourmet meals to a hamburger on the grill. And if that wasn’t enough, there are micro kitchens everywhere loaded with fresh fruit, energy bars, candy, chips, and nuts – plus anything you could ever want to drink including made to order smoothies.
And it’s all free!
Outside each building there are recreational spaces with colorful sitting areas, sand volleyball, tennis, bocce ball and more! The work spaces are all conducive to bring out creativity and innovative ideas. You can watch a movie, get your haircut, or ride a bike across campus to a meeting on any given day. Anyway you look at it I am one proud momma for having a 25 year old son achieve that measure of success at such a young age.
Everyone desires to be successful and live a life of significance. We all want to live in a nice house, land that great job, send our kids to the best schools, make enough money to be comfortable, and have the ability to do what we want. But there’s a difference between success and significance. Successful people personally benefit from their efforts. They add value to their own lives and family by the things they possess and the benefits they receive from their workplace. But the problem is success is all about you.
Once you realize that you can obtain all the success the world has to offer and still never make a difference in the world your life begins to shift. Living a life of significance is about adding value to others.
As proud as I am of Jeremy for what he does at Google, it doesn’t even compare to how proud I am of him for his compassion and daily commitment to add value to others. While Jeremy was still in college at Purdue, he took the principles his father had taught him and structured them into a 501(c)3 that we have now all come to know as Never Settle. Thousands of lives have been changed for the better because of his vision & determination to make a significant impact in this world.
My friend, John Maxwell, said something I will never forget, “Once you have tasted significance, success will never satisfy.” Don’t settle for a life of just being successful. Be intentional and get up every day and think about how you can add value to someone else and then go do it! It’s the only way to truly lead a life of significance!
–Mindy Pittman, Speaker & Coach, John Maxwell Team
