While writing a new welcome email for my newsletter, I tried to trace back my journey to its beginnings. Where was the fuse of words first lit in me?

There are neither right nor wrong answers, of course. Life is an unbreakable chain in which every moment influences the next. It all counts.

There are, however, standout points we can actually see. For me, one of them was my statistics professor, Gary Davis, whom I took all of one class with while studying abroad in the US. That class, however, made all the difference. Or, rather, Mr. Davis did.

First, he made us use software to do our statistics homework. Smart and relevant. What was outright genius, however, was that he made us share our homework on a Wordpress blog. That’s how I learned to set up websites. More than a decade later, mine is still live.

The best part of the class, however, were the conversations. We were a small group, and not everyone showed up all the time. As a result, my friend Tejendra, I, and Mr. Davis often spoke at length about all kinds of things. The differences in education systems. Entrepreneurship. Books. Life.

Crucially, it was also professor Davis who first told me about Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneur-turned-author, and his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Via Ferriss and his book and podcast, I ended up finding plenty of other inspiring people, like Ramit Sethi, Noah Kagan, and more. And that’s how I fell down both the entrepreneurship and self-help books rabbit holes, both journeys I’d stay on for, so far, the rest of my life.

While drafting my welcome message, I realized I’d never thanked Mr. Davis. I saw he still taught at the same school, grabbed his email, and typed out a few paragraphs. I told him where life had taken me since his class, from setting up and running many more Wordpress blogs to writing basically every day for ten years to, at one point, running the most popular free book summary website on the web. I said I appreciated his class, approach, and candor in sharing his ideas with us, and that he really made a difference in my life.

Less than day later, I received a response. Surprisingly, Mr. Davis said he remembered me and our discussions very well, and that he was still telling his students about some of our takeaways. “Congratulations on all your achievements and positive energy,” he wrote. What a guy!

I’m happy about his response, but really, sending the email was enough. I just wanted him to know.

Thank your teachers. Much of life passes by before we can acknowledge it. Someone changing your trajectory for the better should not be one of those things. Plus, you never know who needs to hear a few nice words today.