The Proper Meaning of Influence
What if influence is not about being seen, but about changing the way someone practices a life?
Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I explore one question:
What sustains a life as we age?
I had almost given up on the word influence.
It had become too entangled with Instagram, personal brands, followers, algorithms and people pointing at captions on a screen.
Then I began noticing other forms of influence.
Some older people influence us through the ideas and experience they continue to contribute.
Others influence us by making becoming visible—and possible.
Recently, I watched a story on Landline about Terry McCosker, a maverick agronomist who has spent four decades changing the way farmers think about grazing, soil and land.
As a young agronomist, McCosker began investigating a radical grazing system designed to restore dying perennial grasses. In the 1990s, its principles challenged conventional farming so directly that government agriculture departments tried to run him out of town.
But farmers who adopted the system saw results. Ideas once dismissed as fringe—biodiversity, soil carbon and sustainable grazing—gradually became mainstream. McCosker’s work has since influenced farming practices across tens of millions of hectares and several generations of farmers.
What struck me was not only the scale of that influence.
It was that, at 82, he is still travelling, consulting and speaking about how healthier soil can help farmers manage an increasingly variable climate.
Last week, after the loss of our beehive, I wrote about what happens when the failure of a larger ecological system enters our personal world.
McCosker’s influence moves in the other direction. One person’s sustained commitment has travelled outward, helping to repair a much larger living system.
What sustains someone through those decades of opposition and uncertainty? McCosker cites self-belief, persistence and principles that do not age.
This is influence through continued expression:
I still have something to give.
Joan MacDonald influences in a different way.
At 70, struggling with poor health and increasing reliance on medication, she chose to change direction. She learned to lift weights, changed the way she ate and mastered the technology needed to track her progress.
She now has millions of followers on Instagram, but the platform is not the source of her influence.
Her authority comes from lived experience.
She began late and allowed people to witness the difficult, unglamorous process of change.
She did not become influential because she built an audience.
She built an audience because the honesty of her life became influential.
What she offers is not a formula to copy. It is evidence that we may still have something left to become.
This is influence through embodied possibility:
You may still have something to become.
My own influence story is only beginning.
Age with Attitude started as a place for me to examine how I want to live as I age: how to remain capable, curious, engaged and open to becoming.
I am not writing from the far side of mastery.
I am living my questions in public.
I am not denying decline. I am refusing to let decline become the whole story.
The work is first for me. Writing helps me notice, test and understand ideas and practices that might sustain a life.
I promised myself 100 essays, not because I know they will gain traction, but because I want to give the ideas enough time to deepen into a body of work.
Most writing about aging seems to begin with decline or offer another list of ten things we should do about it.
That is not what I want to add to the world.
I want to show honestly what it looks like to keep examining a life at 70; to build capability, change direction, remain attentive and ask what might still be possible.
This is the aging-with-attitude journey I am undertaking for my current self, my 80-year-old self or even my 90-year-old self. Anyone who finds value in travelling alongside me is welcome to come.
Terry McCosker could not have known how far his once-radical principles would travel.
Joan MacDonald could not have known that beginning again at 70 would enlarge the possibilities imagined by millions of other people.
Perhaps that is how genuine influence begins.
Not with a plan to become influential, but with an honest commitment to something that matters—and the willingness to keep going before anyone else can see where it might lead.
Terry McCosker says:
I still have something to give.
Joan McDonald says:
You may still have something to become.
And I say:
Begin where you are. Do what you can. Keep going.
I’d love to hear how this lands for you.
Hit the Like button below, or let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.
I teach yoga and as my own body has presented its challenges with aging and health issues I have had to come to terms with that. I hope I have influenced my students to believe in their bodies. To recognize that we are not always the way we would like ourselves to be nor imagined what we were going to become.
In the end we only have each moment and I hope i have influenced some of those around me to truly understand this way of being.
Art Garfubkel's advice for a certain person in Yesterday's NYT on turning 80: "The impulse to move quickly is strong, but depth requires stillness. Seek out voices that challenge your thinking. Read widely. Listen carefully. Choose words with care. Let them carry clarity, restraint and a sense of shared humanity."