Inspired By a 6 Year Old

I love a good inspirational story and I think this one is worth sharing. I was working on my blog Sunday, with CBS Sunday Morning on in the background and the segment “On the Road with Steve Hartman” came on.  All of a sudden, I was so interested in the story I started talking notes about the segment right in the middle of my blog. That made me think I needed to share this story instead, so here we go: Jayden Hayes, a 6 year old boy from Savannah Georgia made the local CBS news a few weeks ago and then he was on “On The Road with Steve Hartman” this past weekend because he has heart. It’s a sad story with an amazing lesson to be learned for everyone. Jayden’s father died when he was 4 and very recently his mother also passed away. So much sadness for one little boy in a very short time was a lot for Jayden to deal with. One day Jayden decided he was tired of seeing all the sad faces around him and he wanted to do something about it, but not in the way that most little boys would do it. He asked his aunt, who was his guardian to take him to the store to buy some toy ducks and dinosaurs. The interesting part to the story is that the toys were not for himself, but for others. He started handing them out to people on the street in downtown Savannah who looked like they needed a reason to smile. He not only got everyone to smile with him, he got quite a few hugs and a number of tears too. Mike Cihla, local CBS reporter happened to see Jayden handing out the toys and stopped to talk with him. During the conversation he asked “Why is a smile a good thing to see?” Jayden responded “Because when you smile, it makes me happy…” Jayden has a knack for business, even at 6 years old. He set a goal for himself to get 500 smiles in one day. Since being on CBS Sunday Morning his goal has grown to 33,000 smiles. He’s created his own #hashtag – #thesmileexperiment to expand his smile work to social media. I’d say Jayden is in the smile business now. And like any good sales person, he plans on staying focused on his goals. Let’s help him blow his goals out of the water – go add your own smile picture to increase his count on Twitter. I just did.