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Creating Your Legacy Is Important
How do you want to be remembered when you’re gone?
It happened several years ago, while watching a movie. I don’t remember the title. But I do remember one of the characters anguishing over his boring and uneventful life. “I’m gonna die someday,” he said, “and no one will ever know I was here.”
I’m telling you, that line struck me to the core. I’d never thought about it before. But to be born, live a long life, and die, leaving nothing behind to show for your time here? I decided then and there that I couldn’t — I wouldn’t — let it happen to me.
Many people give less than a damn about such things. And that’s cool. They are perfectly satisfied to live quiet and sedate lives, blowing in and out of existence with barely a whisper. More power to them, I say.
Others rely on their kids. That’s where their legacies lie. With their offspring. And that’s cool too, if you’ve got some. When our children do good things, achieve goals, create jobs for others, win championships, discover a cure for a deadly virus or develop technology that can save the world, people will point at us, the parent, and yes, we can poke our chest out with pride. They are our legacy.
Of course, the flipside of that is when our kid does the opposite and runs the street grabbing old ladies…
