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Have you ever noticed how the same person can suddenly become more interesting when his circumstances change?

People who once walked past without noticing may suddenly stop, greet you, ask about you, or even begin to wonder, “How are you?”

But what really changed? Perhaps not the person. Perhaps the value attached to that person changed.

I have always found the English language fascinating. Having not grown up in an English-speaking environment, I have often noticed how a small change in a word can completely transform its meaning. In one of my earlier articles, Illness Becoming Wellness, changing just a couple of letters transformed the thought itself.

Here too, a small shift—from “Who are you?” to “How are you?”—carries the story of an entire journey, a journey that many people, including me, may have lived in their own lives.

There is a beautiful Hindi line:

“जिनके नहीं आते थे जवाब, उनके सलाम आने लगे,
मेरा वक्त क्या बदला, मेरे नीम के पेड़ पे भी आम आने लगे।”

The tree may still be the same. What has changed is the value (mangoes) attached to it.

We do something similar in our everyday lives. Think of a simple Nokia keypad phone. I could drop it, pick it up, and move on. But when an expensive phone falls, even if it isn’t ours, we instinctively feel the pain. The difference is not merely in the object. It is in the value we have attached to it.

Perhaps life works much the same way.

We often wait for circumstances to change before we believe we have value. We wait for recognition, success, position, money, or someone’s approval to tell us that we have become important.

But what if we reverse the order? What if we start adding value before circumstances give us a reason to?

Value your time. Value your work. Value your presence.
Value the person you are becoming.

Because when you begin to see value in yourself, you begin to carry yourself differently. Your choices change. Your priorities change. And slowly, the results begin to change too.

I have experienced this myself in the recent past, thanks to my mentor to make me realise this. When I changed the values I placed on my own life—what I gave importance to, what I stood for, and what I chose to invest myself in—something else began changing with it. My circumstances changed. The way people saw me changed. The respect changed. And eventually, so did the outcomes.

Looking back, perhaps the world had not suddenly changed its eyes.

Perhaps I had changed what I was bringing to its sight.

And maybe that is the journey hidden between “Who are you?” and “How are you?”

How many of us have experienced that moment when we thought the world had finally changed, only to realise later that we had changed the value we gave to our own lives , and the circumstances simply followed?

Maybe the world does not always need to change first.

Maybe we do.