I recently read a post on Seth Godin’s blog about the joy of the dedication page when writing a book. As a reader, I’ve never paid all that much attention to the dedication page unless the author has done something interesting with it, but of course for the author it’s a whole different thing. As Godin says, “Even if the person you’ve dedicated the book to can’t read it, the writer benefits from the knowledge that a connection was made and that a memory was preserved.”

That’s pretty powerful stuff.

He points out that any project can be dedicated, and that once we start dedicating our projects to the people that inspire us it changes the quality of our work completely.

I don’t know about you, but I like this idea. I want to dedicate my work, make it about more than just me. Heck, that might even help me get enough meaning out of my various projects that I wouldn’t need to have quite so many of them on the go at once.