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.
Noah
With the current value of the Canadian dollars, maybe they weren’t too far off!
A friend working with the Canadian Border Services Agency told me that cigars have the single highest tax of any item coming into Canada.
ALAN WEISS
Anyone who taxes people at a rate more than the item is worth has no regard for the citizenry, only the bureaucracy. It’s like Australia, where luxury and exotic cars cost twice as much. Are they protection some Australian auto industry that no one knows about?
Peter McLean
That is pretty shocking. I lived in Canada for a number of years. Never would have expected it. Meanwhile, here in Australia, there is officially no remaining local car manufacturing industry as of 2017, and the old protectionist tariffs have slowly been decreasing. So the government is talking about eliminating the import tariffs and luxury car taxes. Finally. I would love to have access to better vehicles for more reasonable prices. The kinds of features of cars I used to drive in the US in the early 90s only just started appearing in the mid 2000s here – if at all. So it’s about time we got better products, too.
ALAN WEISS
It’s astounding how governments can simply deny reasonable purchases to citizens. “There’s no good reason for it, it’s just our policy.”