It seems in this fast paced world there is a never ending need to create a legacy…I hear it all the time.
More and more people want to leave their mark on the planet. In the words of Steve Jobs “a ding” in the universe.
Yet what is a legacy? The definition in Wikipedia says: Legacies are, more or less, what we remember about a person or a country. What an individual or a country does today might, in the future, be regarded as being important enough to be thought of as a memorable legacy from the 21st Century.
In the 2 years since my hip replacement I have been more keenly aware of my mortality and those I love and just how fragile and temporary we really are. I have really thought long on the word legacy and what it means.
For some people leaving a legacy might mean writing a book, becoming famous, inventing something that wasn’t there before, creating a nutrition company like USANA, exploring unknown, and so on.
To me the definition of a legacy is far deeper. Whose lives did I touch? How many times have I helped someone in need? Did I lift someone up or put them down? Did I teach my children to love? Love life, love each other, forgive others?
Are you creating a legacy everytime you smile at a stranger? Let someone in during rush hour? Tell someone that you love them? I believe these are the building blocks of creating the real legacy.
We have all heard of the butterfly effect. Wikipedia the definiton says: In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane’s formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks earlier.
What we do today WILL create a legacy of sorts. A kind word, a hug, encouragement will be the fuel to create a butterfly effect and in essence a legacy.
Start each day with the mindset that you will make someone’s life a little better today. It will be the first flap of the butterfly wings that can shape that person’s hour, day, week, year. It is also shaping your hour, day, week, year! This legacy will not be written about, there will be no movie, it won’t be on the 6 o’clock news. It will be completely forgotten in our concious thought yet I believe always remembered in our subconcious.
Legacy is when we are genuinely grounded in making a meaningful, lasting and energizing contribution to humanity by serving a cause greater than your own.
Go out and make someone smile today…create a legacy, your legacy!
John OneHipGuy