Leaving or Living a Legacy?

why it matters to live our lives in the context of something greater.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the word legacy. My understanding of legacy was rooted in the idea that people accumulated as much as they possibly could on this earth and when they died, they’d donate money in such a way that it would help people remember them fondly. It seemed to me like a form of grave narcissism, where you keep centering yourself, even after you are dead.  I never understood why anyone cared what people thought about them after they are dead! Mary Oliver offered this when she asked us what we were going to do with our one, wild and beautiful life.  It’s a good and fair question.

Thankfully, I met some people who challenged my understanding of the word legacy. My friend Angela has the word legacy tattooed on the back of her neck and assured me that the word did not mean what I thought the word meant (yes, that’s a princess bride reference!).

My friend Lisa has ‘living a legacy’ in her personal mission statement and challenged me to re-think what I think when I use the word legacy. Both expressed their desire to live in such a way NOW that matters in the long-term. Instead of waiting until they die, the two of them (and many others) use the idea of legacy to frame their decisions, their direction, their investments - now. I realized that the word legacy can mean something dead or something living. I prefer living.

So, once I got clarity on living a legacy instead of just leaving one, I began to think about what that means and how we do it. And that’s when I met the force who is Kathryn Compton. Kathryn heads up Strong Women Strong World, a movement that runs through the core of World Vision that drives the development gold standard of transformational change - women and girls.

She introduced me to a whole heap of women, who, like my friends Angela and Lisa, are LIVING a legacy now. Women who head businesses, direct investments, shape policy, lead non-profits, create global impact funds, do research, and empower others daily. This movement recognizes that living a legacy in the most strategic way means empowering women and girls. Experts tell us that 2/3rds of western wealth will be in the hands of women by 2030.

Now, wealth isn’t everything - but it is something and the distribution and collective use of wealth is a powerful tool that exploits or empowers. The impact of both perpetuates global poverty or releases global empowerment. This result will not be determined by dead legacies but by living our hopes for a better future in real time, right now. And this gets me thinking.

It seems a critical time to talk about how we live right now. It is one thing to sit on the sidelines and critique the people making decisions that drive impact and outcomes around the globe. It’s a whole other thing to be those people. As women move from the sidelines to tables of power and the distribution of wealth shifts from ‘potential’ to reality - what will it mean? Will it simply be business as usual, with women filling the seats of power, keeping to the same strategies and principles of inherited history - or might the transfer of power and wealth hold the keys to transformation? To live a legacy means to capture and reframe what power we have AND determine what or more likely who that power is for. This is of course what empowered leaders do. They use their power to empower others. Now that is what a living legacy looks like.

I’ll be spending a whole season of my podcast exploring this concept and learning from incredible women are determined to change the future by how they live right now. I hope you enjoy it. I’ve also switched to substack for my writing and podcast hosting in the hopes that we might be able to connect a bit more intentionally. If you have ideas, examples, thoughts, or rebukes (within reason ;-) ) please leave a comment, reach out here to engage as we have this discussion. I trust and pray it will both challenge and inspire you to live intentionally, indeed to be living a legacy.