How Important is a Personal Legacy?

Short answer = it's your choice, although someone once mentioned that choices have consequences.

To provide a little focus, I'd like to chunk down "life" into that component that we call work, acknowledging that (looking back from your last mortal breath), work is no more special than play, rest, family, friends, travel, exploration, love or laughter. In many ways, it simply doesn't rank.

As someone who has racked up 50 years of work life and counting, I'll plead guilty to getting this balance so wrong for so long but suspect that I'm not alone.

A big part of me hopes that this work focus was a generational thing (kind of like a passing fad), with subsequent generations learning from our behaviours (I think they're mistakes, but that's just me) and living life with a more balanced scorecard.

With the benefit of volumes of hindsight, I fully get the traditional work focus, as apart from delivering all or most of our basic needs (food, clothing, shelter and security) it provides a platform to stretch, grow, and leverage that grey matter, a stage to showcase our relative intellect and ability to adapt to different environments and be productive. It's also an opportunity to prove to our parents, teachers, and career counsellors that they were dead wrong, and if we are really lucky, do a bunch of stuff that combines the Holy Grail of immense enjoyment and passion, high levels of competence or expertise, and the really big bucks.

That said, if you were to look back with total honesty (if you are about to turn your toes up, what is the point of kidding yourself?), throughout the work part of your journey, did you leave this rock a better place than you found it as a newborn?

I've asked this before (just humour the old guy), but visualise being at the end, and then answer these questions - it's only for you, nobody else can hear:

• Have you gone out of your way to be friendly and respectful to all colleagues, not just the boss?
• When you have offered a morning greeting and enquired about the other persons' well-being, did you really mean it, and were you interested to hear the response, or were you just ticking an invisible "should" box?
• Have your actions at work been about maximising the benefits to your team, department and the organisation, or were they primarily all about you?
• If you raised your hand for extra work, above and beyond that expected, was it to assist others or was it about personal recognition?
• Have colleagues asked for assistance or advice and you turned them down as you were too busy, when really, you didn't want to help or could not be bothered?
• When you agreed to complete a task by a given date, did you ever/often agree to avoid conflict or be expedient, but never had any intent to fulfill that commitment?
• Were you ever dishonest or intentional harmful when speaking about the words and actions of a colleague, totally disregarding the impact to them and the organisation?
• Did you ever summon the personal courage and integrity to admit some (or perhaps many) failures when answering the previous questions, possibly to yourself and maybe another, and changed the course and level of fulfilment through your revised actions?

If you believe that there is truth in the words of Maya Angelou, and that our legacy is every life that we have touched, wouldn't it be more enjoyable, more fulfilling, and more universally beneficial, if we left far more positive handprints than negative?

I'm pretty sure that you know this from your own observations but here goes.

Life is full of givers and takers. It's your choice which category best describes your personal legacy. Someone mentioned that choices have consequences.

FOOTNOTE

One last thing. If you have managed to read this, and are now reflecting , don’t be surprised if there is some sort of recognition. These behaviors are commonplace. If the recognition concerns a workmate, past or present, drop it - now!

That person will make their own choices, may happen to be reading it now like you, and there is a chance that you are just deflecting to reduce the unease you are experiencing. If you recognise your own behaviours, you now have the option of choice.

Remembering that change usually comes when the pain of staying where you are is too great to endure, or the reward from making that change is too wonderful to resist (usually the former), face the facts that there are no trophies or monetary rewards for choosing this change.

I’d like to challenge you to try it once, then once more, and then again, and see how you feel and what sort of feedback (verbal or nonverbal) you get from your colleagues.

You then have a choice supported by evidence. 🙏