Your Legacy is Now
Life is not a search for meaning from others, it’s about the creation of meaning for yourself.
For over 30 years Alan Weiss has consulted, coached, and advised everyone from Fortune 500 executives, state governors, non-profit directors, and entrepreneurs to athletes, entertainers, and beauty pageant contestants. That’s quite an assortment of people, and they run into the thousands. Most of them have had what we euphemistically call “means,” and some of them have had a lot more than that. Others have been aspiring and with more ends in sight than means on hand.
Alan Weiss states:
I’ve dealt with esteem (low), narcissism (high), family problems, leadership dysfunctions, insecurities, addictions, and ethical quandaries. And I’ve talked about them through the coronavirus crisis. But don’t get the wrong idea. About 95% of these people have been well-meaning, honest (to the best of their knowledge), and interested in becoming a better person and better professional. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be talking to me.
I found the equivalent of the “runner’s wall” in their journeys, where they must break through the pain and the obstacles and then can keep going with renewed energy and spirit. But runners know how far they must go after the breakthrough, be it another half lap or another five miles. There is a finish line.
I’ve found that people in all positions, even after the “breakthrough,” don’t know where they are in the race, let alone where the finish line is.
They do not know what meaning is for them. They may have money in the bank, good relationships, the admiration of others, and the love of their dogs. But they have no metrics for “What now?” They believe that at the end of life there is a tallying, some metaphysical accountant who totals up their contributions, deducts their bad acts, and creates the (hopefully positive) difference.
That difference, they believe, is their “legacy.”
But the thought that legacy arrives at the end of life is as ridiculous as someone who decides to sell a business and tries to increase its valuation the day prior. Legacy is now. Legacy is daily. Every day we create the next page in our lives, but the question becomes who is writing it and what’s being written. Is someone else creating our legacy? Or are we, ourselves, simply writing the same page repeatedly?
Or do we leave it blank?
Our organic, living legacy is marred and squeezed by huge normative pressures. There is a “threshold” point, at which one’s beliefs and values are overridden by immense peer pressure. Our metrics are forced to change.
In an age of social media, biased press, and bullying, we’ve come to a point where our legacy, ironically, is almost out of our hands.
Yet our “meaning”—our creation of meaning and not a search for some illusive alchemy—creates worth and impact for us and all those with whom we interact.
J Mike Surratt
I was reading Denny Hatch’s new book this week “Write Everything Right”; he has more than service problems with WSJ: e.g. cutesy articles on the front page where it use to be serious and concise news. Basically WSJ has lost much of its prestige.
Alan Weiss
I concur. It’s subscription services remind me of a pulp magazine.
Tim Wilson
It’s been going done hill since it became part of the Rupert Murdoch collection of newspapers.
alan WEISS
Excellent point, and a damn shame.
Peter McLean
Was thinking the same thing as Tim. Murdoch-isation would also explain the lousy outsourcing and IT. We saw how father + son operate through all of the phone hacking scandal.
anthony
Alan, what are your thoughts on Forbes? They seem to have some powerful content in many of their articles and not as quick to jump on the big government solution that other publications push.
alan WEISS
I’ve given up on Fortune, so Forbes is okay, but I’m not blown away.
Noah
It seems many papers succumb to the loss of their voice and prestige in an attempt to reach a winder audience as J Mike Surmatt mentions above.
I don’t read the WSJ, but I love my iPad subscription to the Times. They do some incredible annoying things though.
I’m constantly hounded with “come back and resubscribe offers” even though I’m still paying each and every month.
I can access my subscription on a desktop, laptop, and iPad – but not an iPhone. I need another subscription for that.
Lots of DASM out there.
alan WEISS
You spend a fortune on advertising, then you make it difficult to subscribe to various modes rather than have an all-inclusive subscription, you outsource inevitable customer complaints to the Philippines where they are laughably inept, and then you monitor nothing, so that complaints and comments on social media are missed or ignored. Great plan to become extinct.
Craig Martin
I believe that’s what happened to Triceratops weekly and the Dino Daily.
Outsourced their customer centres to grumbling cave folk.
alan WEISS
Someone in the Philippines wearing a Yankee cap, reading a script, and unable to speak colloquial English is simply infuriating if it’s supposed to represent a company’s regard for its customers in the US.