On Thanksgiving day, my family was in such a great hurry that we nearly forgot to say a prayer of thanks before eating. It was my grandfather who took the initiative when he stood and announced that, first and foremost, he was grateful for the young adults he saw before him.

“You’re the ones who can make the world better,” he insisted.

I was slightly taken aback. My grandfather, with all the things he’s worked for and all the experience he’s gained throughout his life, claimed to be thankful for us. For the newbies.

I thought about it more after we’d all gotten food, as my grandmother told my cousins and me stories about her parents. She talked until the rest of us had finished eating, and the food that remained on her own plate was ignored in favor of expressive gesture after gesture.

As I watched her hands move, I thought about her father and imagined what it would have been like to hear his energetic slew of Italian curses, or to witness a game between he and his brother, who were, according to Grammie, “professional checker players.”

I thought about her mother, a soft-spoken German woman admired by children and friends alike for her determination and work ethic.

I wondered if my grandmother’s home life would have been different if her father had been able to prove that a fellow contestant in the Olympic race-walking trials had cheated… Would I have had Olympic blood in my genes if he had advanced?

Eventually other relatives joined the table and the conversation progressed from past to present — how college life is going, who of us actually had plans to enter into the Black Friday madness the next day, and whether someone should really go for another piece of pumpkin pie.

I looked around and smiled, but I was still thinking, just on the brink of realization. I thought about my great-grandparents and how, for them, there was a different generation — Grammie and Pappy, and my own parents, and my aunts and uncles — whose faces contained flickers of the future.

Were their hopes realized? Did their desires for economic security and steady jobs truly manifest in the youth of that time — or were those desires merely abstract dreams about a “better world” that their children and grandchildren would somehow bring about?

At any rate, I suppose they didn’t have much time to analyze the outcome when it finally came into being.

So, then — back to the present — how exactly are we supposed to improve the world? And what does a better world even mean?

I’m hardly an expert, but I think it might have something to do with perseverance. The world has a lot of things wrong with it, and it’s overwhelming to think about tackling it all. But here’s the thing: you're not supposed to fix everything.

No one really expects you to do so, either. It would be quite an impossible task. Taking on such a monumental goal can only lead to feelings of incompetence, unworthiness, and despair, which doesn’t make for any progress at all.

When someone insists you’re going to make the world a better place, remember that they’re not just talking about you; they’re also addressing the thousands of others like you, constantly growing and opening their eyes to the ways they can individually contribute to the world around them.

You see, not all of us are going to win Nobel Prizes. Some of us will be teachers who inspire one student in just the right way; some of us will be poets whose one fiery metaphor changes a reader’s life; some of us will be engineers whose mistakes transform into breakthroughs a few years down the line.

We’ll be actors, climatologists, musicians, first-responders, dancers, bakers, parents, lawyers. And as long as you persevere in that one thing that you can do well and that makes you feel fulfilled, I can’t see how anything but good could come out of it.

In the words of Howard Thurman (author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader):

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”