Hey Y’all, long time no chat. Well, a long time in my new commitment journey anyway. As I’ve said before, my goal is to serve up the perspective to you HOT on a regular basis and this past week was a touch hard given the fact that I was hardly able to serve up the sleep to myself let alone the perspective to you.
I spent the week in Vegas. No, I was not there to party, although I can’t say I didn’t enjoy a beverage pool side, but I was there to gain MASSIVE perspective! So my having fallen off the writing wagon this past week will inevitably serve us both in the end, I’m sure of it!
Y’all, I was at the Global Training Conference for the company with which I am an independent consultant- Arbonne. And this was my 10th conference with this company, so you know I’m in deep with the perspective shifting because if you’ve ever been to a conference of any kind, you know the entire goal, the whole POINT, is that those in attendance will have a shift. We’ll come back better than how we went in. And that most certainly happened for me.
I have a laundry list of concepts and perspective shifts that I will dissect and unpack with you guys over the coming days and weeks from this conference, but I figured I would just jump in the deep end with the overarching shift that I felt most impacted me this past week, and that’s leaving a legacy.
Maybe you’re like me and you have felt like the word ‘legacy’ is somehow over used, or maybe just thrown around in a way that makes it feel a little bit more accessible to the majority of us, but this weekend I really felt like the gravity of this term- legacy- was felt in my soul.
Are you leaving a legacy?
I’m not talking about leaving a 401K, a bank account, or a life insurance policy. I’m not talking about leaving physical humans here on earth when you die and therefore leaving your last name and somehow a vague memory of who you were.
I’m talking about something much bigger than that. I’m talking about leaving an imprint, a foot print; something that lasts long after you’re gone and speaks of who you were and what you did. Legacy is less about what you leave when you die, and SO MUCH MORE about what you do while you’re alive. It’s about who you are. It’s about who you touch. It’s about what you change, and what you DO with the time you’re given here. It’s about who you influence and how far your ripple reaches. It’s about the calling God has put on your life.
So painfully few people really leave a legacy, wouldn’t you agree?
For me, legacy has always given me a sense of purpose and motivation. Rita Davenport says, “We need to be more so we can do more so we can have more so we can share more.” To me, this is legacy. It starts with BEING MORE than what this life requires of us. Yes, I’m going to say it: This life doesn’t really require much of us! It actually wouldn’t make much different to our life if we did relatively little with our time here. Many of us manage to phone it in- so to speak- most of our life and wonder at the end where all the time went.
Readers, when you take just a moment to look at life all as one thing, when you can shift your focus from the day to day hassle of getting from one thing to the next and look at your entire life- everything that has been, and everything that will be- as one big event in history, it might give you pause and perspective. I know it does for me. I am pretty certain that my whole life’s purpose, the whole reason I’m here on earth, doesn’t actually have much to do with laundry, or saving money, or getting out of debt, or college, or accolades, or losing weight, or cooking, or whether or not I’m wearing the right shoes, or whether my neighbor likes me, or what filter I use on my IG pictures, or how many wrinkles I have, or soccer practice, or what my parents did or didn’t do, or any of the other things that seem to take up an incredible amount of that life picture. When I think about it, I really wonder if all of those things are just distractions linked together, one after another, day after day, until we find that we’ve made it to the end of our lives and we have forgotten to actually do anything meaningful.
Before you send the hate mail, don’t misunderstand me. There are a million little things we each do in our lives that bring meaning to it. But I wonder if you’ve considered the entire picture: Is my life meaningful? Will it be meaningful to anyone else when I’m gone?
The founder of our company describes his desire to leave a legacy as a selfish thing, and sure… I guess you could view it that way. It might be selfish to want to be remembered not just for what you did for you, but for what you changed and did for others. But I have to tell you, his desire to leave a legacy has made a MASSIVE impact on my life. Massive. I never met Petter Morck, but his having lived his life with purpose and meaning for not just himself but for others… has brought enormous meaning into MY life. He left a legacy alright. The ripple from his life is still being felt in the life of strangers day after day, years after he has left this earth.
When he talks about his legacy, although he muses that it might be a selfish pursuit, he then says something that proves leaving a legacy is ANYTHING but selfish…
He says, “Because who am I? Dust soon.”
Who am I? Dust soon. I’ve heard this video a few dozen times, but this line that he says, almost as a throw away, really caught me this week. Who am I? Dust soon. Isn’t that exactly right? We’re all suffering from a terminal condition: Life. It ends. We all end up in the dirt, so to speak, and so his desire to leave a legacy that outlasts his time here is innately unselfish. Because he’s just dust. It was never for him! It was always for those who would come after and be affected by his having been here.
This concept is just transfixing me, Y’all, and I hope you’re really feeling it like I did. We have a responsibility to leave a legacy. We have been given time… this incredibly finite resource… and we act as if it will never end and we know we’ve got 80 years left in the bank, when the truth is Buddha was dead on when he said…
The trouble is, you think you have time.
So I don’t know about you, but I am going to make it my life’s mission NOT to make a life… but to make a legacy. Because who am I? Dust soon. None of it will be for me anyway, right? And regardless of how much money I manage to leave behind, money has never once made a ripple all on it’s own. Memories don’t make ripples. Life insurance doesn’t insure impact.
When I look at my whole life as just one thing, one seemingly short and insignificant blip on the radar of the human history and experience, I want it to have mattered. I want it to have been a blip that shifted the blips that come after me. Not because it will matter to me, I’ll be dust, right? But because it will matter to God. It will matter to the generations to come.
Because it’s the only thing that will matter about me.