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.
The fourth photo is the balcony outside the master bedroom, almost to the top, and the final photo is straight out our main door. We use the side door to access the house.
Peter McLean
Well, it IS warm down here in my part of Australia – despite cyclones hitting us too.
I enjoyed digging everything out of metres-high snow when I used to live in Ontario, but that looks like a lot!
We’ve got floods and cyclones around Australia, you’ve got megasnowstorms in North America, but Cairo has its own anthropogenic heatwave.
By the way, do the snowplow people get a tip for the multiple trips?
Alan Weiss
No tips, we rarely even see them, they usually operate in the early morning. They don’t even bill us until the summer. They’re excellent plowers, questionable businessmen!!
Daniel Rose
I’m sure it loses its charm after a while, but the snow looks like a welcome change from our recent tropical cyclone…
GSP
Global warming doesn’t mean it’ll be warm all the time, but that rising temperatures in places that have traditionally been very cold (arctic circle etc) will cause extreme weather conditions elsewhere – snowstorms, tsunamis, rising sea levels, etc.
Problem with climate change (and other megatrends) is that it’s hard to recognize until it’s well underway, harder to link it back to a cause – even without all the politicization, and near impossible for us mere humans to stop.
Alan Weiss
That’s because the vast climate changes that occur are going to occur anyway, and humankind has a minor cause and minor ability to change it.