Ep# 045: A Story That Will Move You To Do More Good with Mary Latham

This is one of my favorite stories of all time. Mary Latham is the girl behind more good. So this girl took a 50 state road trip just to compile stories of acts of human kindness to create a book to donate to hospital waiting rooms, all birth from her own really difficult story.

www.moregood.today

So, her mission began back on October 29th in 2016 when she packed up her mother's old Subaru and drove to the orient point, cross sound ferry. But really there's a piece of Mary's story that had a sad ending. And from that set ending, she started a new beginning after her mother passed away. She was moved to do something to make a difference, to start to focus on the good versus all of the hardship that she experienced and the hardship in the world. So for the last few years, Mary's home has been other people's homes, strangers with a story who would welcome Mary in and told their tails of human kindness, someone who did something really kind for them or something that they witnessed on the street or in their own lives or in their own homes.

And for the last few years, yes, years, Mary has been on this forever ongoing road trip to compile these stories and along the journey she's had her own bouts of illness, but she is so committed to compiling stories that are going to touch hearts. And it all started with a little conversation with her mother and I can't wait for you to hear about it. Sometimes our purpose isn't necessarily about an idea that we can monetize or a business that we can scale. Sometimes it's about following our heart and making our impact.

Mary, I am so pumped to have you on the show today and I'm just like blown away by you. Like I know you as the sweet friend in college, you had this unbelievable knack for photography, but it's been such a gift over the last few years to watch you bloom into who you are today and what you're doing and the impact you're making. And I'm beyond pumped to get it into the earbuds of our listeners because they've got to hear about you and what you're doing so well.

Can you tell us more about you, like your path to this point and what you’re doing right now? (cause I know it's gonna speak to everyone’s soul)

MARY: Yeah. So I after college moved into Manhattan and I wanted to do wedding photography but obviously cannot afford to live in Manhattan with a wedding photography budget. So I kept that on the weekends and I got a nine to five for the weekdays where I worked at a law firm, just kind of, it was called the practicing law Institute. It was a continuing legal education where I was an assistant. So I had this nine to five where I didn't really have hours and hours of work. I had like, you know, a half a day work. And so I would use that time to be building my website, learning how to take online business courses. And do stuff like that and kind of creating my exit strategy from this company. And then I babysat for two pretty wealthy families in New York at the time. And so that was on the weeknight.

So, I kind of did my little hustle to afford my shoe box in Manhattan and I was working on the morning of the Sandy hook elementary school shooting and I had to babysit that night for a six year old. And I was kind of just sitting at my desk. I had just gotten into work and I was open up my news and looking through it and just horrified like I think we all were that day. And my coworker walked by my desk with a coffee from Starbucks and he said you should've come today. We would go once a week for the seasonal latte. And I said, yeah, I couldn't afford it. He said, no, it was free. And I was like, “What are you talking about?!”

And I kinda turned around and looked at him and he said, “Yeah, there was a man in earlier buying gift cards because it was December 14th (so right before Christmas) and he was buying gift cards for employees and his company and he randomly just bought an extra run for $100 and said run it out on the line behind me.”

And so, all those people got a free coffee and it was just a really cool thing.  You hear about moments like that, these little acts of kindness from strangers, but I had never been affected by one. And here's this guy I worked with, he had just turned 30 he was so sweet. He was going through a divorce, his mom had passed away that year and he had back surgery coming up (so it was not his year) and he was a happy person, but I had not seen him happy in a while. And so watching him, he was like…I can still see his face.

He was like glowing about this free $4 coffee from a stranger. And he walked away, and I called my mom at the time because she was battling her second round of cancer. And so I would check in with her every morning and I chatted with her and told her about it.

And then I quickly switched the topic to the shooting. We actually, I grew up without TV, so there wasn’t one in her home (so she had no idea about it). And so I was telling her all the details and going on and on about it and just how is there so much bad out there and everyone is horrible and it's such a scary place. And she said “Mary, there's always going to be tragedies and horrible things that will inevitably happen in our lives and in the world, but they'll always be more good out there, if you look for it.”

And so that was one of our bigger conversations before she ended up in the hospital for surgery for her cancer. And in that interim of time, it was like two months where a friend and I started a little Facebook page, we called it the ‘Gratitude Project’ and we'd ask people to send stories in, little acts of kindness that they remembered.

And 11 days after I launched the project, my mom ended up in the hospital and the doctor told us she had couple of hours maybe a couple of days and the first two days were kind of a blur. And then I realized I had to tell work (my three different jobs) that I wouldn't be in the rest of the week. And I opened up my email, I had set up a whole separate email for the project at that time. And I opened up my personal email and there was a story from a girl who had lost both of her parents already. She was a friend of my sisters. So when I saw her email, I kind of thought, “Oh, she's checking in.”

But it was this really beautiful story. And I read it to my family and we were all crying. And it was just, you know, it's one of those moments where here's the girl that I went through twice what I'm about to go through and she's still looking for the good and focusing on that moment of kindness that just happened to her and it was like this little shred of hope for me in that waiting room.

And there were people in there alone.  There was a couple, they were divorced and their daughter was in her thirties and she was dying.  She wanted to see her ex-boyfriend and the dad was saying “No!” And the mom was like, “She's dying!”  It was the worst week of my life. But I remember thinking in that moment still how lucky I was that I had the foundation and my parents had been married 40 years and I was one of four kids and we were close and other people in that room didn't have that.

And I thought they need something in here.  There's nothing in here. There wasn't even a bad magazine to read about Kim Kardashian’s new nail color. So what could put in these rooms with some hope? And so, I came up with (in the waiting room) this idea where I was like…it's obviously my mom.

She's the one that told me this and I want to look for this good. She talked about and I want to take her car to do it. So I came up with a plan where I would take our car, I would drive to every single state and look for the good that's going on in these communities that we don't get to hear about as much. Definitely not in the news! And I would kind of shine a light on those and basically compile all the stories into a book to donate to a hospital waiting rooms so that people could have some stories to read when they're in there next.