Legacy Projects
Date Posted: November 4th, 2010
This post is part 3 of the “How to Find Your Right Business Idea and Not Hate the Process or What I’d Tell My 21-year-old Self” series, a follow-up to the Many Bad Business Ideas series. There are four posts planned for the series and new entries will be posted every Wednesday… or Thursday as the case may be.
There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete. We may try to fill the void through urgency addiction. Or we may become complacent, temporarily satisfied with partial fulfillment. … The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”
~Stephen Covey First Things First.
In last week’s post on things to consider when starting your business I mentioned in passing this thing called the “legacy project.” This week I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the term “legacy project” and why I think it’s important.
What is a Legacy Project
A common journaling exercise is to imagine your funeral (I know, morbid) and what you’d love people to say about you. Maybe it’s that you were the best parent to your kids or that your work helped change people’s lives for the better or that you always made people feel welcome. Your answer to this exercise is a clue as to what your legacy project should be.
A similar exercise is to imagine you’re nearing the end of your life and you’re looking back on what you’ve done. What things would leave you feeling satisfied. It could be that no one else values your rock collection, but if you made that rock collection as awesome as possible you’d consider that a life worth living. Again another clue as to what your legacy project.
Your legacy project is the project you work on to create your legacy–the things you’re remembered for–be it being the best parent you can be or creating the best rock collection you can.
How Legacy Applies to Business
When I started thinking about business, I didn’t make it a priority to figure out what my legacy should be. I just wanted a way to make money that wouldn’t make me feel sick. That’s it. So I picked ideas that seemed good (Great Lakes Early Music, Music Teaching, Small Business Web Marketing, etc.) only to find I’d get stuck. Sure some of the stuckness was from the specifics of that business (not wanting to be tied to a store, not wanting to be tied to Ann Arbor, etc.) but some of it was because of a deeper, fundamental problem. The businesses weren’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make.
If I had thought of Dragon Dormant 3 years ago, I would have dropped it. Sewing on its own isn’t enough of a motivator for me.
What I hadn’t realized was that I needed to have an outlet for creating my legacy. And not just that, I needed to feel content that I was spending enough time and energy on it before I could feel comfortable seriously pursuing other less-important-to-me projects… even if those “less important” projects were the ones bringing in the cash. I know, that sounds a bit crazy, but it was true for me.
The point here is that if you haven’t figured out what your legacy is or aren’t spending enough time on it to feel satisfied, you run the risk of major distraction during the start-up phase of your business and/or stuckness. Not good.
When you do have an outlet for creating your legacy, and feel content about how much time and energy you’re putting in, you’ll be able to put your all into your business and more business options will be open to you. Now that I have an outlet for my legacy project–this blog–I can pursue other money making avenues (Dragon Dormant, music teaching, tutoring) that wouldn’t have felt like “enough” before.
Signs You Need to Figure Out What Your Legacy Project Is
You may be thinking, “*Psh* Legacy? I’m too [young/worried about paying bills/whatever] to be thinking about that. It’s not an issue for me”. I say, hear me out. See if you’ve experienced any of these signs.
- You’re deeply unhappy with your career/major. People call you cynical. You feel like there are better ways for you to be spending your time than at the office or working on school work. There are things worth your time that you’d rather be doing.
- You feel guilty doing things that matter to you. Let’s say you love reading. If you guilty for the time you spend on it, that could be an indication that you aren’t spending enough energy on your legacy project. (“I should be working on my Project, not reading Dresden Files.”) It could also mean you have some belief that reading is a waste of time. Either way, if you’re feeling guilty you should try to determine where it’s coming from.
- You rarely/never experience flow. Flow is the state of intense focus where time passes differently and you get tons of stuff done. It’s an incredible feeling, and if you aren’t getting into it it could be because you don’t feel satisfied with how much energy you’re putting into your legacy project. (“I can’t afford to lose myself in music practice because I won’t have time for Project”)
If any of these characteristics apply to you, take a few minutes to do the following exercise. It won’t hurt, and you might learn something.
How to Find your Legacy Project
Let me start by saying that you won’t know what your legacy project is after one exercise. Finding your legacy project is an iterative process. Play with one idea for a while. After a few days/weeks ask yourself if it’s enough. If not, what is it missing? If it is enough, give it another few days/weeks and ask again. One exercise can’t tell you how you’ll feel about your idea two weeks from now. What it can do is give you some ideas to try.
Here’s an exercise to start with:
Answer these questions
- If you could only work on one project today, which one would leave you feeling the most satisfied?
- What’s important to you? Why? Think things like “being a good parent” or “creating the greatest rock collection”. Dig deep. No one has to see this but you.
- When’s the last time you experienced the flow state…. and felt like it was the most satisfying use of your time?
- What would you like to be remembered for?
- When you’re old and looking back on your life, what kind of life would like to see?
The answers to these questions will give you a glimpse of what your legacy should like like.
This isn’t the end, though because your answers will undoubtedly be too vague.
The next step,then, is to come up with some projects that are open enough to feel fulfilling and specific enough so that it’s not hard to see what the next steps are.
Example: Let’s say one of your answers was to be a great parent. That’s too vague. Being a great parent could mean lots of thing. What does that mean to you? What characteristics do you want your kids to have? Perhaps you want them to be really creative. That’s a project. It feels fulfilling and the next actions are clear. You could enroll them in an art class or schedule unstructured creative time at home or read books on how to inspire kids’ creativity. You get the idea.
Next, take the most exciting project you’ve come up with, and start working on it… or at least think about how you can start working on it. What can you cut from your schedule to make time for it? What mental blocks to you have to address?
Now you can start the iterative process, and I’ll get into that topic next week.
How This Would Have Helped My Younger Self
My 21-year-old self felt very uncomfortable contemplating her “legacy project”. She’d been told before that thinking about such things was a waste of time, and some part of her was afraid that that was true.
If she knew what I know now, she wouldn’t have listened to those people. She’d have tried more ideas, and thus would have stumbled on the right legacy project more quickly. All that angst was totally unnecessary.
