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.
Anna Filina
I was asking myself the same question. I wonder whether people use social networks to simulate a feeling of accomplishment, because they are unable to achieve it through other means.
Alan Weiss
It’s a huge vanity publishing opportunity. People can use a platform they’d never gain based on individual talent or merits because no one is vetting or evaluating the quality of the ideas. I can understand the Facebook palaver about getting upgraded to first class or a photo someone took of the moon. I find it banal, but it’s no worse than the mundane talk at most bars or cocktail parties.
But the pseudo-crediblity of being “endorsed” by people who have no idea of whether the other person has a criminal record or can even write their own name, and being “liked” by strangers for no reason—this is a pathetic and lonely desperation. The idiocy of someone asking me to endorse them when I’ve never heard of them, or to follow them on Twitter because they’ve chosen to follow me, is beneath stupid. Those people on Twitter claiming to follow thousands of people—really? They’re spending entire days sifting through 140-character entries? For what?
Paul Ryan
I have been thinking about this lately quite a bit too as I’m trying to get a new business off the ground. I’ve come the conclusion that if people appreciate and agree with what your doing and what you are creating they’ll work with you. If they don’t then they won’t.
This concept of getting people to “Like” me is ludicrous, if someone truly likes and/or respects me than I should already know this or they will show it by reaching out to me for advice, or to become one of my customers.
Alan Weiss
People need to see value for them in what you’re doing. You have to meet THEIR self-interests. Otherwise, they may like what you’re doing and even you, but they’re not going to buy anything.
Lynn
Thank you for saying what so many people are thinking but don’t say! As someone who grew up in the US and is now living outside the US, many changes have occurred over the past 5-10 years which have magnified the growing narcisstic society I am seeing! I think fb,etc. is about presenting an alternate ‘image’ based on a need for recognition AND political correctness…a sort of distortion of reality don’t you think?
Alan Weiss
Lynn, I do. I think that people like to create an image for themselves to “advertise” how others should see them (as opposed to how they really are). That’s why all these proclamations about how much they love their partner, and the photos of them addressing some obscure group, or standing next to some pseudo-celebrity, are, at the end of the day, depressingly sad.