A beach walk leaves evidence that the next tide does not promise to keep.

Footprints are honest about how most effort ends. You make a mark, it is genuinely there, and by evening the water has taken it back without malice or judgement. Almost everything works this way, including a great deal of good work that nobody will be able to point to in ten years. The walk was still worth taking, and the erasing does not reach backwards into the walking.

If you have been measuring things by whether they last, try measuring one by whether it was worth doing at the time. Do something this week that leaves nothing behind.