Everyone has value

A year after graduating high school, I spent two months living in a small village outside Ganta, Liberia.

I was there helping an organization called Equip Liberia build a medical clinic that would provide healthcare to a remote community.

During my stay, I lived with the doctor who would eventually run the clinic. He welcomed me into his home, a mud hut without electricity, where he lived with his wife and six children.

There were three rooms.

They gave me the largest one.

I’ve thought about that generosity many times since.

When the clinic finally opened, people came from across the community to celebrate. For many, this was their first opportunity to access healthcare close to home.

And what a celebration it was.

People danced, sang, shared food, laughed, and celebrated throughout the night.

I can still picture it.

It wasn’t a fancy building. It wasn’t some revolutionary technology. It was a medical clinic providing something many of us take for granted.

But to that community, it meant an enormous amount.

I was fortunate enough to return just three months later and see some of the children I’d met during my first visit. They looked healthier, happier, and full of life. The community also had access to a water facility we’d helped build.

I can’t pretend to fully understand what life was like for the people who lived there. Two months in someone else’s community doesn’t give you that understanding.

But those experiences profoundly changed how I see the world.

I learned a lot about gratitude, generosity, and how much the things we take for granted can mean to someone else.

More than anything, I started to understand something that has stayed with me ever since.

Everyone has value.

One place at a time

Over the years, my professional and community work has taken me to Bangladesh, Liberia, Guatemala, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia.

I’ve also travelled across Canada for work, meeting people in places like Grande Prairie, Steinbach, Hamilton, Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary.

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to many other places in my personal life, too. But these particular journeys stand out because of the people I met and the experiences we shared through our work.

Around the world

Liberia

Ten months volunteering a year after high school, helping build medical clinics across Liberia. For two of those months I lived near Ganta with the doctor who would run the clinic there, his wife and their six children.

With Equip Liberia

Where my work took me. Not every place I've been.

Different countries, communities, cultures, and ways of seeing the world.

People have different beliefs, priorities, experiences, and ideas about how life should be lived.

Sometimes those differences are enormous.

But one thing I’ve found interesting is how much we have in common.

People want to care for their families. They want to contribute. They want to laugh, celebrate, be loved, and have a sense of belonging.

And I think most of us want to know that our lives matter.

I’ve come to believe that people have value simply because they’re human. Not because of what they produce, how much money they make, where they were born, or what opportunities they’ve been given.

There’s something inherently good and valuable in people, and I think we have an opportunity to reflect that goodness in how we treat one another.

It’s a belief that has shaped my life, although I haven’t always done a particularly good job of living it out.

“I’ve come to believe that people have value simply because they’re human.”

Learning to value people when it’s difficult

I have pretty strong opinions.

I like challenging ideas, questioning decisions, and pushing people to think about different ways of doing things.

I care deeply about the work I do, and sometimes that means I get a little too invested in how something should be done.

Earlier in my career, that got me into trouble.

I’d think I was helping by challenging an idea or pushing a conversation forward, only to realize that the person on the other side wasn’t hearing what I intended.

Sometimes I came across as dismissive or unnecessarily critical.

And sometimes I probably was.

That’s been a difficult lesson for me.

It’s not just what I say that matters. It’s what people hear.

Everyone brings something different into a conversation.

Someone might be dealing with a difficult situation at home. They might be exhausted, hungry, stressed, or worried about something I know absolutely nothing about.

Sometimes we’re just having a bad day.

And it’s easy to forget that when you’re frustrated with a coworker, disagreeing with a client, or trying to get something finished.

I’m learning that being right isn’t always the most important thing in a conversation.

You can have a good idea and communicate it badly enough that nobody wants to hear it.

That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations or agreeing with everyone.

I still think challenging people and ideas is important.

But I want to become better at doing it in a way that makes people feel respected, rather than making them feel like they need to defend themselves.

“You can have a good idea and communicate it badly enough that nobody wants to hear it.”

What this means for the things I build

I eventually found my way into software development, but before that I worked in fundraising and program management.

Across those different roles, one lesson keeps coming back to me.

Understanding people is often harder, and more important, than solving the technical problem in front of you.

A client might come to me with an idea for a website that I think is completely unnecessary.

They might want a complicated feature, an unusual design, or an approach I wouldn’t have chosen.

My first instinct might be to explain why it’s a bad idea.

But that isn’t always helpful.

Maybe there’s something they’re trying to accomplish that I haven’t understood yet.

Maybe they have a reason for wanting it that hasn’t been communicated clearly.

Or maybe they’re wrong, and it’s my job to help them understand why another approach might work better.

Either way, their perspective deserves to be heard.

That’s something I want to bring into the websites, products, and tools I build.

I want people to feel like someone actually thought about them.

That someone considered what might frustrate them, what they might struggle to understand, and what would make their experience a little easier.

Not every problem needs a complicated solution.

Sometimes people just need someone to listen carefully enough to understand what they’re actually asking for.

“I want people to feel like someone actually thought about them.”

A little career advice to myself

For a long time, I thought becoming more valuable professionally meant becoming better at my craft.

Learning another technology. Understanding more complicated systems. Building faster. Having better ideas.

Those things still matter, and I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to improve at them.

But I think I’ve underestimated something much simpler.

People want to work with people they enjoy being around.

People they trust.

People who do what they say they’re going to do, care about the quality of their work, and don’t make everything more difficult than it needs to be.

I’ve worked with people who are incredibly talented but exhausting to collaborate with.

And I’ve worked with people who made everyone around them better simply because they were patient, dependable, thoughtful, and fun to work with.

The more experience I gain, the more I appreciate the second kind.

Of course, being easy to work with doesn’t mean never challenging decisions or having strong opinions.

I don’t want to lose those parts of myself.

I just want to be better at recognizing when to push, when to listen, and when to let something go.

There’s another part of this that I’m still figuring out.

Like most people, I want to feel valued too.

I want my work to matter. I want people to recognize what I contribute. I want opportunities to grow, take responsibility, and build something meaningful.

And sometimes I think I’ve tried too hard to prove that value.

By explaining too much, pushing too hard, or trying to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about.

But maybe I don’t need to spend so much energy proving myself.

Maybe I just need to keep learning, do good work, be someone people enjoy working with, and trust that those things matter.

I think that’s the advice I’d give myself today.

It’s been many years since I lived with that family in Liberia.

I’ve travelled to more places, changed careers, worked with different people, and learned things I never imagined I’d be learning.

But I still think about that little home outside Ganta.

A family with eight people living in three rooms, who welcomed me into their lives and gave me the largest room they had.

And I think about the night the clinic opened.

The dancing, the music, the food, and the joy of a community celebrating something that would make a real difference in their lives.

Those experiences remind me that the things we do can matter enormously to other people.

But they also remind me that it’s not just about what we accomplish.

It’s about how we treat people along the way.

I want to build good things. I want to challenge ideas, solve difficult problems, and keep getting better at what I do.

But more than any of that, I want the people I work with, the people I love, and the people who use the things I create to feel like they matter.

Because they do.

And sometimes I need that reminder just as much as anyone else.