Do You Focus Enough on Your Personal Legacy?

Regardless of where you are in your career and in your life, it is never too early to start thinking about your legacy. One way to understand this is to answer the following questions:

What are your significant accomplishments?

What is the impact that you are having on others?

Have you lived a life that you are proud of: a "good life"?

Accomplishments

This part of your legacy involves the actual things that you leave behind. Did you create something of lasting value—a business enterprise, a work of art, a useful tool, etc.? These are often things that are attached to one’s work and career. For example, I asked a very well-published colleague why he was driven to publish so much and so frequently. His response was that he felt that his published research would leave a lasting contribution to the scientific literature. My father-in-law is working on a detailed book of his family’s history. His intent is to leave this behind so that young and future family members will understand more about their roots.

Generativity

Erik Erikson defined generativity as one’s concern for the next generation and the world that it inherits. This is the portion of legacy that is focused not on self, but on others. One way to think about this form of legacy is a parent raising psychologically healthy children who are themselves successful. Engaging in behaviors that leave the world a better place would also suggest generativity—for example, the woman who recently made a $1 billion donation to a Bronx medical school to allow students to attend tuition-free. This not only benefits the medical students but society as well by increasing the number of trained health care providers.

Self-Focused Legacy

Of course, some people go through life trying to set goals and accomplishments without thinking very much about the impact that attaining those things has on others—for example, an astronomer who discovers a star that is named after them. Or, a wealthy person who sets and achieves a goal of making the world’s richest list. One way to focus on your personal legacy is to see if you can achieve what you, personally, want to achieve, but also have that goal benefit others—donating time or treasure to a charitable organization, inventing something that helps protect the environment—a “win-win” situation for you and for others.

The Meaning of Your Life

In the end, we all want to feel that we have lived a life worth living. What constitutes a good life? To some extent, that is a philosophical question, but psychologists have a lot to say about it, too (Park & Peterson, 2009). A good life consists of having more positive than negative experiences, having positive and healthy relationships, and finding value in the things we do, including our work and careers. Ideally, if we have a good life, we leave behind an important and lasting legacy.