I'm not even sure John Cusack (2012 Columbia Pictures) could help me. It's a couple of days till the end of the world and I'm not ready, I'm not organised nor do I have my legacy in place. The Mayan calendar has predicted the end before but Friday seems a pretty definite date to many who have organised bucket lists, bought all the baked beans at the supermarket and are filling the bath with water. I know it has to be true because tour companies have organised groups to Mexico, visiting Mayan temples in the hope of getting one more payday. Just in case Friday is the last day, it behoves all of us to take a breath and think about what we might leave behind. Surely someone, maybe John Cusack, will make it through and he'll have the responsibility to read all about us and the legacies left behind.
Howard Stevenson, a noted professor at Harvard, is the subject of a book called "Howard's Gift", uncommon wisdom to inspire a life's work, dealing with the end of life to affirm a life well lived. Stevenson is all about the end and thinking about what you want on your tombstone, what you want people to say at your funeral and how you want to be remembered. From this view point, Stevenson wants people to think further ahead than the next iPhone release, think deep about how they want their life summarised and then make decisions that will make that happen.
Stevenson wants people to "consider how you’d want those you care about to describe you, on the most personal levels, separate from the structures and roles that define you to the rest of the world. Envision what you’d want your children to say when they describe you to their children. Or think about it this way: if a camera could take a “legacy” snapshot of you in the moment before you departed the earth, what do you want that picture to show? Starting at the end’ means investing time up front to develop an aspirational picture of your future as a guide for the decisions you make throughout your career and your life,”
According to Stevenson, defining that legacy and having a belief in yourself to achieve the end result will have strong influences on life and career decisions. Bringing all of life's possible endings together helps that decision making process become focused, giving you a clearer picture on why you should decide on a particular fork in the road. If you can't decide on your direction then maybe, Stevenson suggests, you haven't had a good look at the end. The book's author, Eric Sinoway construed that "identifying your legacy is the essential precursor to creating the road map of how you want to live your life and is the foundation for the decisions you make in your career". He suggests even the little day to day decisions are easier if you have your road and final destination mapped out.
In the book corporations are used as analogies for life, where the most successful have a definite end game in mind and do everything along the way to achieve that goal. That corporate strategy can be used for individual life choices, or as Stevenson describes it "business planning for your life's work". Developing an image of where you want to end up gives you the ability to make decisions based on a long term strategy, effective for the most successful companies.
Realising you have a choice to decide your end, is the start point for what Stevenson calls "defining your legacy" and the most successful people use this thinking as a tool to guide the major choices they make in their careers and their lives. If that is the case, I have a few hours left to polish up my end game but remember, “Everything will be okay in the end, if it is not okay, it is not the end.”—author unknown.
No comments:
Post a Comment