What Do You Want Your Legacy To Be?
Newly minted entrepreneurs are told to focus on building a business around a problem they’re passionate about solving. It’s all about finding your ‘why’ and knowing what professional legacy you want to leave behind.
It was only once I quit my day job, started my own business, and got away from the deafening noise of corporate America that I started to think about what I wanted my legacy to be.
It struck me as odd that I had never considered this before. More importantly — it made me sad. So, I leaned in and thought about why that might be.
My realization? There is so much noise in corporate America.
Noise from corporate politics and the relentless pursuit of KPIs. Noise from appeasing your boss while maintaining the respect of your team. Noise from the demands of doing more with less budget and fewer employees. Noise from chasing that next promotion so that you can get… more noise?
There is so much damn noise around us that we can’t hear ourselves think about what we want for dinner tonight, let alone what we want to be remembered for.
We don’t quiet the noise long enough to consider our legacy because we’re so consumed with the 9–5 work of building someone else’s.
If you walked away from your full-time job today and never looked back, you would find that none of that noise matters.
But you don’t have to do that because I did it for you. And I’m here to tell you what I’ve learned.
I’ve learned that if you quit today, you’d realize that none of it matters. The things that you stressed over yesterday will be inconsequential to your tomorrow.
That promotion you ran yourself ragged for? Doesn’t matter. The VP you were desperately trying to impress? His opinion has no bearing on your life. That sales target you lost sleep trying to achieve? None of that matters anymore.
So, if none of that matters, then what does? Legacy.
Jason Clarke put this in even sharper focus for me when he asked the audience of his TEDx Talk what they wanted their legacies to be. He asked this while projecting images of gravestones with photoshopped epitaphs.
- “Here lies me, I protected the status quo.”
- “I met all my KPIs. I satisfied all departmental and OH&S standards.”
- “I kept my head down and asked no questions.”
- “I made my superiors look good.”
“Do you think that anybody wants that to be their life’s achievement?” Clarke asks. “Is this a life? I don’t think anybody wants this.”
Nobody wants this because none of it matters. I know this because if they mattered then these words wouldn’t be so laughable.
And because none of this matters, it’s even more important to find a way to quiet the noise long enough to consider what you want to be remembered for.
- Do you want to be remembered as the boss who always had her team’s back and never threw her people under the bus?
- Do you want to be remembered as the leader who highlighted his team’s accomplishments to fuel their careers rather than his own?
- Do you want to be remembered as the executive who knew every employee by name because it signaled to them that their work mattered?
Because the KPIs and the sales targets won’t matter, but these things will.
How you treated people, and how you made them feel, will always matter.
Realize that, while the noise is temporary, the energy you lose to that noise is not.
You owe it to yourself to turn down the volume every so often, consider your legacy, and align your actions to how you want to be remembered.
Because the machine of corporate America will keep chugging along with or without you, but your legacy — good or bad — is yours alone to own.
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