What on earth IS influence?

It’s one of those words that gets used so much it starts to lose meaning. Everyone wants it. Few can define it.

Here’s my working definition: influence is the capacity to move people toward a different way of thinking, feeling, or acting.

Notice what’s not in that definition: followers. Reach. Platform size. You can have all of those and have no influence – if the people who follow you are unchanged by the encounter.

And you can have a small, deeply engaged community and enormous influence – if the people in it are genuinely moved by what you do and say.

The question is not ‘how do I build influence?’ as if influence were a thing to accumulate. The question is ‘am I actually changing anything?’

Influence that doesn’t produce change is just attention. And attention, without change, is just noise.