Time to leave your legacy

In this latest addition to my Surviving MidLife blog, I’ll be talking about a word that has grown in both relevance and meaning for many of today’s 40-somethings – and that word is legacy. Google it and you’re immediately transported back to the world of John D. Rockefeller, the oil magnate cum philanthropist, who was worth 3% of the entire GDP of the USA at his death ($900m then; a mere $400 billion in today’s money). He built his legacy in the form of more than £540m in donations to medical research, addressing poverty and educational needs amongst African Americans in the southern states. And that’s pretty much what ‘leaving a legacy’ meant up until the turn of the millennium – very rich men making shit loads of cash from their businesses and giving some of it away. We remember them because of the buildings they created with their names emblazoned on them so we know exactly what success looks like and who achieved it.

But thankfully that understanding of success is in the process of making a radical transition from purely cash terms to a broader appreciation of what we as humans can leave behind for those that follow. It’s going to take time as, in the Western world, we are pretty much hardwired to set life goals with financial KPIs. Whether it be getting on the property ladder, buying our first (and then a flashier) car, going on foreign holidays, owning the latest tech gadget or getting paid more than other people we know.

Noticeably though these ‘life’ goals are actually more like ‘youth’ goals, or maybe ‘young adult’ goals. They’re the success measures we establish as we leave school or further education, and enter the ‘real’ world. They are without exception comparative goals – comparative against the benchmark of our peer group, our parents, and the multitude of external influencing factors from social media. My eldest son and I have an ongoing debate about whether Mr Beast, one of the most ‘successful’ YouTubers on the planet (net worth $500m and counting), is a helpful person on which to base one’s life aspirations and expectations. On the one hand, he is a modern-day philanthropist, making oodles of cash from YouTube ads and ‘giving it all away providing long-lasting relief to individuals suffering from homeless, hunger, and poverty’ as he stated recently on Twitter. On the other hand, he admits to another life goal of owning his own League of Legends esport team. So much for a new take on legacy – one man’s Premiership team is another’s esport team. It’s all still so much flashing the cash.

To be fair to my 12-year-old son, and also to the 24-year-old Mr Beast – this is what young people have always aspired to and possibly always will. The American Freshman Survey has asked the same questions each year to students entering colleges around their self-perceptions and aspirations. Each year since 1947, the survey shows an increase in self-worth and earning expectations that is not aligned to increasing standards of living across the US. It’s fair to assume that the same is true of our own students, accessing the same role models on the same platforms.

But this youthful aspiration often leads to midlife depression when the either the goals are achieved or prove to have been unrealistic in the first place. What happens to legacy when the goal isn’t to see your name up in lights?

The answer the majority of my midlife clients give me is – my children. To which I always ask – “what about your children?” Is it enough to be reproductively successful? To have ticked the not always easy to tick box of procreation? Certainly this is a legacy of sorts – a continuation of the bloodline (if the solution wasn’t achieved through adoption or donors). But, no, it’s not just the creation of offspring that is being referred to but something more – their happiness, their confidence, their opportunities, their freedom, their right to be an individual, to choose their own path, to live with more purpose. In fact it is usually all the things that the client sitting (virtually) before me feels they did not have access to.

Yet the majority of my clients are comparatively affluent – most have a standard of living their parents’ parents would have envied. Some are first generation middle-class, or first-generation university graduates – but most are not. So what exactly is the measure of success for this offspring-focussed legacy? What is being delegated to their children in terms of responsibility for living this idealised life? And critically what are they, as Dad, doing to secure this outcome for their offspring?

It was much simpler for previous generations of Dads. They understood their role. Provider. They went to work in the knowledge that their contribution was clearly defined. For this generation of Dads it’s got a whole lot more complicated. They now understand that this patriarchal role is actually one of avoidance. The role of provider ensures there is no accountability for the teaching, coaching, mentoring, or therapeutic element of parenting – or as one of my clients put it recently ‘carrying my share of the physical and emotional load’. And so the work I do with those clients is to separate out the two tasks – that of actively raising their children on the one hand, and defining their legacy on the other.

At this point it’s worth bringing in a little theory, because maybe the whole fixation on our children, whilst a valid and important societal evolution (if not revolution) in masculinity, is disguising something else. Something more fundamental. Erik Erikson was a German-American psychologist who back in the 1950s devised a psychosocial development theory which consisted of 8 stages. Within these stages he identified the core developmental challenge at the heart of that stage. For example in Infancy, he described it as Trust vs Mistrust – a challenge which if overcome provided a strong advantage in later life, and if not could hold future development back.

But let’s leap ahead to midlife, or Middle Adulthood, where Erik identified something he coined as Generativity vs Stagnation. I’ve spoken about generativity in previous posts, and to many clients, but it’s worth revisiting as it’s certainly not a concept most people are familiar with. Generativity is the drive to create and nurture things that will outlast oneself. It is certainly present in parenthood but bearing in mind we are generally having children later in life, when Erik was coming up with this he was talking about an experience occurring some time after parenthood. He was talking about something far more akin to legacy. To answering the question, “How can I contribute to the world?” whether the interpretation of ‘world’ is community, society or humanity. And Erik found that at the heart of this drive came the core value of caring, of kindness, with the result of this transition into generativity being a sense of value, worth and belonging.

The flip side of stagnation is the presenting symptom in many of my midlife clients. It’s what Adam Grant, the organisational psychologist and LI self-help content guru, described as ‘languishing’ – the middle point on the mental health polarity between thriving and depression. It comes from not feeling connected to anyone else, and to not contributing to the greater whole. And if generativity is not discovered or engaged with, then Erik Erikson found it led to a deepening of neuroticism (i.e. focus on self) and a continued decline in productivity.

Well, that’s all well and good. I’ve got this unfulfilled need to contribute to the greater good but what if, to paraphrase hundreds of my clients, ‘I don’t bloody well know what to do!’ Well let’s listen to two of the few people who have been using the word legacy as a central theme to their ‘personal brand’ for some time now – Gary ‘Vee’ Vaynerchuk and the much less well known and considerably less annoying Ged King.

We’ll start with Gary Vee because… well he’d like us to start with him. As is pretty evident I’m not a massive fan of his communication style or tone, but back in 2008 well before VaynerMedia, when he was busy turning his dad’s liquor business into a multi-million-dollar enterprise, he was already posting overly-excitable videos talking about the importance of legacy in his everyday behaviours and actions. He summed this up as follows – “I have no interest in making the most money in the world. I have an interest in having the most people at my funeral.”

Whether you like the language or not what he was sharing was a very clear legacy goal – he wants to positively impact on as many people as possible. It’s not the popularity itself he seeks, that’s simply the indication he needs that he is successful in pursuing his goal, what he recognises is that successful generativity is about those impacted not the one doing the impacting: “I am acutely aware that my legacy is more about what my community creates than what I create.”

And from that legacy goal he worked backwards, in the understanding that every action and behaviour he demonstrates today, and tomorrow and the next day will ladder up to this legacy. It’s classic outcome theory. To change or achieve an outcome, it’s not enough to just focus on what you do, you also need to identify the right behaviours to demonstrate. It’s how you show up that’s as important as what you achieve. And deeper still, how you show up will be dictated by the thoughts and feelings you have. It’s got to be authentic. If you don’t believe in it, really feel it, then it isn’t going to become reality.

So what about this other chap, Ged King? I first came across him watching a TEDX video and was struck by how different from the usual business leader or academic presenter he was. This chap was sporting a serious beard, sharp haircut and neck tattoo – and he was talking about cutting hair. Turns out that this barber from Manchester had figured out the same thing that Gary Vee had – that it wasn’t what he did that was the game-changer, it was what his customers could achieve after his hair cut that was his legacy. Because Ged was spending his free time cutting the hair of the local homeless community. People who had lost all sense of their own dignity and their potential to be accepted back into society. And he could give them that back. Through the power of a good haircut, attentive personal time and that trusty barber loquacity, he could restore their self-confidence and make them not just feel visible but literally be seen by people again. He set up the Skull Fades Foundation and was soon training and employing the very men he saved to continue his message. Since then he has taken this approach to other places to other communities and other countries.

Will Ged be famous? Probably not – he’s had his literal 18 minutes of fame on TEDX and some other media features but that’ll be it. Will he make a ton of cash? Highly unlikely (though he seems pretty entrepreneurial so never say never). Is he busy creating a meaningful legacy? Absolutely. For it’s his actions each day, and the lives he touches and changes that are making the difference and therefore building the legacy. In his words: “I took something I do every day of the week, and found a way to impact people, and entire communities.”

So we’ve heard a few stories from a few different characters and explored some of the theory behind our midlife drive towards generativity. And for some that will be enough motivation to explore their own legacy further. But for others, still stuck, still languishing, still pointing at their children’s very existence as their legacy, it’s worth returning to Erik Erikson, and his last stage of development, Late Adulthood. Here the results of our midlife choices are laid bare in the simplest terms – Integrity vs Despair. At this moment of reflection on our life’s achievements, we will discover either true satisfaction with our contribution, our use of our time and our capabilities – or risk being left with regret.

Midlife is a wonderful time in all our lives for reflection and redirection. It’s a time when we can bring to bear all of our hard-earned experience and point it somewhere where we can make a real difference. So let’s end, where else, but with Gary Vee: “I think a lot of people consider their children to be their greatest legacy. For me I hope it can be that, and something more.”