I’ve decided to publish Wonder Work monthly, so now you can look forward to a new edition on the first Wednesday of every month. That gives me more time to play with Wonder Work content and expand upon it on LinkedIn, which is a thing I’m doing now. Everything is a test and learn campaign!
I keep a Notion database of ideas for future issues of Wonder Work. Sometimes, newsletters are developed weeks in advance of publication. And sometimes, two unrelated stories collide in my brain and produce a new idea that demands to be written about the night before. This is one of those.
The 2025 World Series last week had me thinking about the 1981 Pawtucket Red Sox. Again. Specifically, I was thinking about memory, forgetting, and the quiet dignity of toiling in obscurity. That’s when I read JA Westenberg’s essay on “being infinitesimally small.” Et, voila!
When Game 3 of the 2025 World Series went 18 innings on October 27, 2025, everyone was excited. A little too excited, if you ask me. Hell, we just had a World Series Game 3 that went 18 innings in 2018. Mookie Betts played in both games seven years apart!
A few months ago, I discovered Dan Barry's book "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game” and fell in love again with a story I hadn’t thought about in thirty years. Barry captures something essential about persistence nobody sees, dignity nobody celebrates, and working-class endurance that doesn't make it into highlight reels.
After this most recent 18-inning game, no one mentioned that freezing cold Saturday night in Pawtucket forty years ago. Believe me, I checked. I suppose that makes sense. The team doesn't exist anymore. After the death of Ben Mondor, beloved owner of the PawSox, the team was taken over by a private equity firm and soon moved out of state. The stadium was demolished in 2025. Most of the players have faded into obscurity. It seems our collective memory has moved on. And maybe, despite my hurt hometown pride, that's exactly as it should be.
Photo Credit Boston Globe, 1981.
"The liberation of insignificance lets you focus on what actually matters to you, right now, without the weight of cosmic importance crushing you." - JA Westenberg
The Pawtucket Paradox
Writer JA Westenberg doesn’t bother with sentimentality. "Of course I'll be forgotten. Everyone will be forgotten. The sun will expand into a red giant and engulf the Earth, and every trace of human civilization will be vaporized. All the books and buildings and great works of art, gone. Every reputation carefully cultivated, every legacy anxiously protected, will be erased."
This sounds depressing when you first read it. But as Westenberg argues, insignificance isn't the problem — it's the solution.
We've constructed an entire culture around the anxiety of mattering. Silicon Valley tells us to "make a dent in the universe." LinkedIn celebrates "thought leaders" and "change makers." Social media metrics quantify our relevance in real-time. We choose careers partly based on how impressive they sound at dinner parties. We agonize over decisions as if the fate of the world hangs on them.
But what if you just... didn't matter that much? What if your choices and achievements and failures were basically rounding errors in the grand scheme of things? Would that be so bad?
When the longest game finally ended on June 23, 1981 — two months after it started — Dave Koza drove in the winning run. His bat is in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But ask a baseball fan today, and they probably won't know his name.
For the first fifteen years of my adult working life, I was trying to prove my worth on someone else’s terms. When I started my own business, there were no external KPIs, benchmarks, or revenue targets I could rely on to prop up my self-esteem. Money is always the easiest shorthand to connote value, but after the first few successful years, there wasn’t much of that either. Social media is an IKEA catalog of strangers to compare yourself to — apples to oranges in the artificial glow of a ring light.
Growing up in a culture that valued hard work and harbored a nagging suspicion that the game was rigged, success was optional. What mattered was work itself: struggle, strive, hustle, suffer. How else would you know you're alive?
Deciding how to define success on your own terms is one of the greatest gifts and slipperiest challenges of being self-employed. But here's what Westenberg helped me see: if I succeed in all of my ambitions for Clew, no matter if I struggle, strive, suffer, or just stumble into a clover field of dumb luck, the outcome will be the same. Someday I will die, and sometime later, I'll be forgotten.The sun will eventually engulf the Earth. Heat death will claim the universe.
And somehow, knowing this feels kinda great.
Brand Naming Case Study
Does the name of your business put a smile on your face every time you say it? Learn how Clew helped one consultant evolve her brand from generic to distinctive.
"The meal you cook tonight matters to the people who eat it. The conversation you have with a friend matters to both of you, in that moment. The work you do matters to your colleagues and clients and the people affected by it. But in five hundred years, none of it will matter at all, and that's absolutely fine."
That long-ago game at McCoy Stadium illustrates this beautifully. It doesn't matter that history has forgotten it. It mattered to the 27 fans who stayed until dawn, to the players who lived through it, to my childhood self imagining an enchanted baseball game that couldn't end while my mother rinsed shampoo from my hair with that magical commemorative cup.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash
Here's the paradox: the things that don't echo through eternity might be precisely the things worth doing. When you're not performing significance, when you're not trying to cement your legacy, you're free to just show up. To play baseball in the cold. To build a business that might fail. To write newsletters that no one reads.
As Westenberg puts it: "Once you stop trying so hard to be significant, you often end up doing better work anyway. You're not paralyzed by the fear of failure or the need to prove yourself. You can experiment, play, explore. You can do things for their own sake rather than for external validation.
Here are two small experiments to try:
The Ephemeral Project
Create something this week that you deliberately don't document, share, or preserve. Cook an elaborate meal and don't photograph it. Write something and delete it after reading it once. Notice how it feels to let something exist only in the moment, mattering only to those present. Does removing the performance aspect change the quality of your attention or the depth of your engagement?
Chronicle the Forgotten
Research one person, event, or achievement in your community that is overlooked or forgotten. It might be someone who influenced your industry, a local business that shaped your neighborhood, or a relative whose presence has vanished from family memory. Spend time with their story. Share it with three people. Become their Dan Barry, even knowing your chronicling will eventually be forgotten, too.
There's something profoundly freeing about accepting insignificance. As Westenberg puts it: "The liberation of insignificance lets you focus on what actually matters to you, right now, without the weight of cosmic importance crushing you. You can be kind to people because kindness feels good, without trying to tip the scales of history. You can create art because creation is satisfying, without competing for immortality."
When you're building something over 10 years that nobody's watching, it helps to remember that even the things people ARE watching will eventually be forgotten. The 18-inning World Series game everyone was excited about last week? Most people won't remember it in ten years. The pressure is off. You can just do the work.
This is not a case for nihilism. I’m not saying that nothing matters because everything will be forgotten, but that things can matter deeply, momentarily, locally — and that's enough. More than enough.
The rubble that was McCoy Stadium was redeveloped into a [gasp] soccer stadium. Most people don't remember the longest game in baseball history. But on that freezing April night in 1981, something real happened. People showed up. They persisted through absurd circumstances. They mattered to each other.
That story matters to me, too. Not cosmically. Not eternally. Just... locally and temporarily and truly.
As Westenberg concludes: "The universe doesn't care about us, and that's okay. We can care about each other instead."
The Question
What would you create, attempt, or persist through if you knew, really knew, that you'd be forgotten anyway? How might accepting insignificance actually free you to do more meaningful work?
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You did it! You've made it all the way to the end of this essay. Have you been reading about the jewel heist at the Louvre? Here are two stories about things that were lost ... and found eventually. So, which will you choose: Door Number One or Door Number Two?
(or buy me a coffee.) Meet Nancy Martira. I'm a brand strategist and communications consultant who brings endless curiosity to every project. If you've got a challenge that needs a fresh, unexpected perspective, let's talk!
Communications consultant, brand strategist, & Wonder Work creator. Curious about everything from terrible orchestras to happiness algorithms. Feed your curiosity; starve the doom — one small idea at a time. Let's wonder!