The Problem With Legacy

What to focus on instead

Photo of the Taj Mahal by Julian Yu on Unsplash

I am not a man who needs a legacy. I want a new adventure. – Jean-Luc Picard, Picard Season 3, Episode 1

Hitting the big 5-0 last year has made me more deeply consider what’s important in life, which will be one of the themes running through this blog.

And if you’re looking to start their own business, the issue of legacy may be front and centre in your mind.

I’ve been to many business conferences where the speakers on stage try to increase the energy in the room (and in turn boost sales of their training products) by asking the audience what they want their legacy to be.

They may ask questions like:

·        What do you want inscribed on your gravestone?

·        How many people do you want to attend your funeral?

·        What do you want people to be saying about you there?

·        What do you want your eulogy to be?

These questions make us consider how we should spend our days while we still can, because once we’re dead, we can no longer try to affect the way people regard us.

This is where a positive legacy can act as a perfect Instagram reel on steroids. Something that would stroke our egos daily if we weren’t six feet under.

But is legacy something we should be proactively working towards, or just an after-effect of how we live our lives?

And does our legacy need to be based around our work, or something else?

He was warned…

Here’s a little exercise:

Spend a few minutes thinking about what you would like to leave as your legacy. What would you like to live on after you’ve departed? What would you like your impact on this world to have been?

Once you’ve done that, consider the event that your legacy successfully lives on, but no-one connects your name to it. In fact, no-one in 100 years’ time has ever heard of you.

Do you feel okay with that? Or is your main driver for creating a legacy to have your name live on after you die?

If it’s the latter, your ego is driving your need to be recognised for your efforts. Question why that could be. Who cares what people say about you after you’re dead as long as you can live with yourself while you’re alive?

In his book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday writes: ‘There’s no one to perform for. There is just work to be done and lessons to be learned, in all that is around us.’

The future legacy we plan may never come to fruition due to circumstances beyond our control. Even if it does, it will eventually experience a decline and fall. The universe is governed by entropy. Nothing lasts forever.

You could build a massive business empire, like F.W.Woolworth, only for it to become defunct¹ less than a century after your death.

Bill Gates himself said: “Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.”

Then there’s the matter of rapidly changing public opinions on history. As Harvey Dent said in the movie The Dark Knight Returns: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

If you have, or plan to have, children, expecting them to become your legacy is probably a pipe dream. You can’t control how other people live their lives. Of course, there are extreme examples like Richard Williams pushing his daughters at an early age to become the greatest tennis players in the world (an outcome that he had planned before they were even born), but our job as parents is mainly to teach our children how to become good people and prepare them to handle the challenges of adult life.

We could aim to give our children as much financial support as possible, but we can’t control what they do with the money, how they decide to live their lives or how they react to future challenges. We can only teach them the best we can and hope that they’re ultimately happy despite the mistakes they will inevitably make.

You may be reading this, thinking that you don’t want your life to be wasted, but who’s to judge whether or not you wasted your life? Every day you’re impacting the lives of those around you without even knowing it.

My father certainly did. He left school at 15 and joined the post office in his hometown of Camborne, Cornwall, where I was also raised. He delivered the mail until taking early retirement at 55 for health reasons.

Apart from a 2-year stint in the army in Preston, he lived in about 7 homes during his life, all within a 2-mile radius.

Dad knew what he liked, and steadfastly stuck to it.

When my mother suggested that we moved 14 miles away to Truro, because she and I had to travel there daily for work and school, he replied (only half-jokingly): “You can go live there if you want. I’m staying here.”

He spent his spare time racing pigeons, watching cricket and rugby matches with his friends, playing bowls going to the pub on Friday nights, and to the Royal British Legion club during the day a couple of times a week. He helped to build the local cricket pavilion and sometimes mentored young players to improve their game. In retirement, he became the captain of the local bowls team.

The only regular job he knew was as a postman. He never strived to leave a legacy. He said that, as long as a few people sang at his funeral, that would be good enough.

Yet when he died aged 71, about 200 people turned up to the church. Some were sat in the balcony above the organ and others had to stand out in the hallway.

Some build a legacy. Dad built relationships. He favoured community over accomplishments, and enjoying every day over working towards a future goal. And even though in 80 years’ time, everyone who ever saw him alive will be dead, the time he gave to others to improve their lives in small ways – a helping hand here, a friendly ear there – left an impact that will filter down the generations.

And that was more than good enough for him.

So take your ego out of the equation. Let your actions speak for you. Work to make each day better than when it started. If you build a business, focus on improving the lives of your customers in the here and now.

And if you do, it will all build to something beyond your imagining.

You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world. – Dara Horn

People ask about a legacy. There’s no legacy. Statues are torn down. Graveyards are ransacked. Headstones are knocked over. No one remembers anyone. What does live on are good deeds. If you do a good deed, it reverberates to the end of time. – William Shatner

1. There is a Woolworths still running in Australia and New Zealand but it’s unrelated to F. W. Woolworth’s company. The name was copied in 1924 as a dare because it was still available for use in New South Wales. Maybe that’s his actual legacy…