The One Thing You Already Have That No One Can Take From You

Scott Levine was flying down a hill on his bike one morning when a woman stopped her car and rolled down her window. "You're going to get hit," she warned him. His immediate thought? What does she know? Minutes later, he tumbled over the hood of a car, his head hitting metal, traffic stopping all around him.

He was okay physically. But something cracked open in that moment. Three days earlier, he'd told his wife he wanted to separate. He'd grown up surrounded by constant conflict — yelling, chaos, emotional noise — and he'd been carrying all of it, fast, down that hill. The crash felt like a message: Figure this out.

That's the kind of moment most of us try to avoid thinking about. The collision between who we're pretending to be and who we actually are. Scott stopped pretending.

He started meditating — seriously, over an hour a day — after attending an event by Dr. Joe Dispenza in Toronto in 2016. What surprised him wasn't the meditation itself. It was what happened when he did it in a room full of strangers. Eyes closed, not touching anyone, not even speaking — and yet he felt more connected than he had in years. Something in that shared silence told him: people need this.

That feeling became a question, then an idea, then an app called WishWell. The concept is simple but kind of radical: you gift someone a wish by holding a vision of them already living their joy — not your hope that it'll happen, but genuine gratitude that it already has. The science behind it involves quantum physics and the difference between the frequency of wanting something and the frequency of gratitude for it. Scott spent years learning to trust it.

Getting there cost him almost everything. His clinic of 22 years collapsed financially. He found out it was over when his assistant texted him a photo of an eviction notice — while he was at a festival in Costa Rica. The divorce happened. The rebuilding happened. He cried more in those nine years than in his entire life before them.

And somewhere in that loss, he met Leena. They were introduced during COVID, lived in different countries, and spent over a year talking on the phone before they ever met in person. She became his partner in every sense — personally and in building the platform. She also taught him something he'd never learned: that being and doing are equally valuable. He'd spent his whole life believing his worth lived in his productivity. Learning to simply be present — without shame — turned out to be the hardest and most important work he'd ever done.

The results of WishWell are hard to explain away. A waitress in Mexico received a wish, and three months later ran down the sidewalk toward Scott and Leena: My wish came true — she now owned her own restaurant. A nonprofit leader named Kathy, at a festival in Texas, received a wish from strangers, and within hours a complete stranger donated $50,000 to her organization — enough to feed two million more families.

Scott is honest that wishes don't arrive the way you picture them. When his own word for the year was "freedom," he secretly meant money and travel. What came instead was an eviction, a divorce, and the dismantling of everything he was clinging to. The freedom was real. It just required him to let go first.

Here's what he built all of this toward: the idea that presence — your genuine, undivided attention — is the one thing every human being arrives on Earth carrying in equal measure. Not money. Not talent. Not followers. Presence. And we give it away constantly to apps designed to extract it, leaving us exhausted and feeling like the world is only getting worse.

But what if you gave one minute of it — deliberately, intentionally — to someone who needed it?

Within about 40 seconds of genuinely giving to someone, your brain releases oxytocin, the belonging hormone. You feel more connected. The other person feels seen. During COVID, Scott's former mother-in-law was alone in a hospital going through chemotherapy when strangers on the app began sending her notes. She didn't know their names. She only knew she suddenly felt less alone.

Here's your moment to sit with this: Think about where your attention actually goes in a day — your screen time, your mental energy, the moments you zone out. Now think about one person in your life who might need to feel genuinely seen right now. Not a like. Not a reaction. Real attention. What would it feel like to give them one full, undistractd minute of your presence today — and what might it feel like for them? What's actually stopping you?