The impact of you is determined by them.
The title is partially not true because how you act will definitely show your image and people will judge it with common sense, but the other part is only up to them to decide the impact of your actions which makes it already terrifying in a way of not knowing what something really is. World is a scary place with full of unknown threats and uncertain futures and when even your actions are uncertain it is really depressing for me.
Do me a favor and please imagine this. What do you think you would value more? A help in a troubling days or a help in a easy times? Of course you would choose the first one. And what if the effort of those helps are equally challenging for the helper’s side? Still the first one is more valuable to you simply because you need it.
So the impact of my effort can differ greatly on your conditions. And those conditions could be anything. It could be because they were feeling little bit silly at the time or something was just annoying them for a while. Those conditions create a crack in the facade we put up front in order to hide our vulnerability. And since the conditions can be anything it is really hard to predict when or where these cracks would appear.
Sometimes people don’t have a lot of cracks but only few deep ones, some people may have a lot, it really is out of your control.
Everyone gets into hard situations eventually mentally if not physically or materially then you will help them as a friend and then they will truly appreciate your company, your persistence and recognize your value. But isn’t that just same as waiting for the crack to appear? or do you not want you to be valued higher?
Antidote: is you don’t want to be wanting to be valued higher. Because everything is random and if it were not like this then things would be very boring. If everyone’s effort was valued in a fair and standard way then you would start to take it as an obligation. People are not a objects or a reward for your effort that you grind. So just keep going and take the treatments you get with appreciation.
Seems to me that you made a correct conclusion… and then jumped to something inconsequential.
There is a difference between “wanting what is best for the other person”, “being maximally helpful”, and “being perceived by the other person as maximally helpful”. Sometimes they are completely contradictory. The best possible thing for the other person is to never be in a situation where they would need my (or anyone else’s) help… which would make me useless for them. Preventing problems is more helpful than solving them, but will probably be less appreciated.
Optimizing for being perceived as maximally helpful would actually be quite evil, because it would involve undermining the other person’s ability to avoid or solve their own problems, secretly eliminating all alternative sources of help, and keeping the (perceived) problems as big as possible to make your own help more needed. The person would feel grateful, because you brainwashed them and ruined their life.
In real life, this problem usually appears in less dramatic forms, but quite frequently. Like, you want to help people, but you also want to be appreciated for your help, so your “elephant in the brain” avoids the optimal way to help them in favor of a way that increases your perceived helpfulness. As a parent, you can be doing things for your kids that you should actually teach them to do for themselves. As a teacher, you can be telling your students information that they could more conveniently read from the original source, if only you pointed them towards your sources. As a legislator, you can be creating laws to help the poor, involving punishments for those who also try to help themselves (“if you make $10 as a side income, you are no longer eligible for the $100 of our support”).