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.
Mike Sivertsen
Market Ticker
http://market-ticker.org/
and Dr. Housing Bubble
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/
have, shall we say, vastly different outlooks.
Alan Weiss
Understood, but my point is that this recession is largely perceptual because the media and those who can profit from downtimes are emphasizing bad news. Simplistically: Unemployment may be 10%, but half of it is chronic, institutionalized unemployment, and that means that 95% of people are working.
Mike Sivertsen
Here is a good discussion on layoffs and unemployment by Dr. Gary North
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north738.html
This discussion of the FED and the insolvency of the major banks that is being hid from Joe Public is also informative (by same author)
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north739.html
It appears to me that the only way a collapsing, partially-free economy built on debt and spending can recover is to have a massive contraction. Painful but necessary. Of course, we could always try Communism again – that worked so well in the 20th century.
Those who have been frugal and have ‘acted their wage’ (as Dave Ramsey, financial author, says on billboards here in Dallas-Fort Worth) may find opportunities.
However, any business transaction that involves the government will be fraught with politics, ideology and complexity.
Witness the Cash for Clunkers fiasco.
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTk1YTkxOGYyMDk0ZWJlYmE4YTYzMWRkZWYzYWZmZWI=
Alan Weiss
That’s a lot of opinion with a lot of links. I can’t tell whether you’re being serious or ironic (Communism in the 20th Century?), so I have no idea how to respond. The contraction has happened, people who overspent were punished, most of the corrupt were caught, and now we’ll head back to another cycle. I don’t believe in conspiracies and things hidden from the public, but maybe I’m just naive.
Graham Franklin
Sorry you don’t believe in conspiracies and things hidden from the public. Come and live in the UK for 6 months you will soon change your mind.
Alan Weiss
Perhaps, but it one goes through life worried about Hanger 59 or the Loch Ness Monster or circles in crop fields I really think one’s got an advanced case of paranoia.
Graham Franklin
Good point…..
Mike Sivertsen
re “most of the corrupt were caught” is sadly wrong.
Karl Denninger on Market Ticker writes about this regularly. Here’s one example among many and a reason an audit of the Fed is gaining ground in Congress.
More Fed Lawlessness: AIG
http://market-ticker.org/archives/1166-More-Fed-Lawlessness-AIG.html
Goldman Sachs is named in this article as another arm of the global bankers behind these corrupt schemes.
Hollow States and Global Financial Predators
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/06/link-hollow-states-and-global-financial-predators.html
EXCERPT
“A couple of global guerrilla themes here: incessant and morally bereft financial predation at the global level (financial tribalism?) and the emergence of hollow nation-states that serve merely as vehicles the enrichment of these predators.
“NOTE: It’s also an interesting reprise of the current carbon trading scheme — essentially, instead of responding to environmental stress with real solutions (a push to create local resiliency) we get another big rip-off that will line the pockets of global banksters.”
Alan Weiss
I’m not sure what your point is, and I hate all these links as if they justify an opinion, when they’re just someone else’s opinion. There are still “evildoers” out there, but the worst of the scams were cratered by the sinking economy which could no longer generate returns to sustain Ponzi schemes. That’s my point. (Let along those gullible and stupid enough to invest in them in the first place.)
Your excerpts sound like the UN is taking over the world rhetoric. There are still bad guys. There always will be. But people and regulators are now more on guard.