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.
Kel Marsh
Hi Allan, re ‘Locking Down A Country Make Sense’. as a ‘Kiwi’ that has experienced the New Zealand COVID elimination regime I fully agree with you. An increasing number of Kiwis are becoming intolerant of high level lockdowns, as we watch countries such as the UK and US open up.
We are told that the rest of the world is a mess and getting worse and NZ is the only safe place to be. The level of fear perpetrated by those at the top is palatable among vulnerable sectors of our population, but the rest of us can see that our prime minister has no other plan but to lockdown early, again and again. Increasing fear goes hand in hand with increasing control. Awareness of loss of personal autonomy is dawning on law-abiding Kiwis and is beginning to be reflected in the polls.
While the media of the world admires the ‘optics’ created by our prime minister, rollout of the vaccine has been extremely slow – as of yesterday only 40% of our police force has been fully vaccinated, testing of border staff is infrequent, theres a big gap between what the govt says is happening and what most of us are experiencing. We are a small population surrounded by the world’s largest moat, the Pacific Ocean. NZ handled 2020 well. But now proactive, productive Kiwis are asking for our government to move on asking for the ‘Living with COVID’ plan. So far nothing.
Alan Weiss
Kel, I can’t understand how New Zealand and Australia (and Canada, originally) have been so remiss in vaccine distribution. It’s not like we can’t send things to the South Pacific. It’s been a year. Even amidst polarization and an election in the US we managed to produce and distribute vaccines rapidly. (Trump actually got it done.) I have no respect for politicians—-who rarely suffer the effects of lockdowns personally–who decide to limit everyone’s choice, undercut their means of income, and shut down social interactions. You cannot achieve zero deaths, zero infections, Covid is here to stay. But you can significantly reduce deaths (most of which are among the unvaccinated) and reduce infections through vaccinations and social distancing and masks, as needed. Your government is just killing business and destroying savings.