The person you helped without an audience still belongs in the truth of your reputation.

What people say about you is assembled from what they happened to see, which means it is weighted toward the visible. The quiet help, the unrecorded hour, the thing you did with nobody there to notice: none of it makes the account, and it can start to feel as though it did not count. It counted. The record is simply incomplete.

When your reputation feels thinner than your effort, recall two or three unseen things you actually did and let them stand without needing to be mentioned. Then look for someone else’s unseen work and say what you noticed.