Your Legacy

One of my basic truisms is "You know when you were born. But, you don't know when you are going to die."

While I believe in working hard, work is a means to earn enough money to allow you to experience life. Work is itself not an end in and of itself. Rather, it is a means to an end.

For those who believe that they are going to work hard and create some lasting legacy or impact on the world, I would suggest you do the following:

• When you can devote and hour, sit down with a pen and pad of paper.
• Write down the names of any persons that you can think of who died more than fifty years ago.
• Once you have completed your list, look at it. You will likely find two things 1) there are not that many people on the list; and 2) it is nearly as likely that you will find infamous people on your list as famous people on the list.

The purpose of the exercise is make you realize that if you expect to leave some lasting legacy , it is likely not to happen. With over 6.5 billion soles in this world, there is a lot of competition.

In the end, I am trying to make two points: 1) you need to enjoy life - as that is really the purpose of living; and 2) you should try to leave the world a better place than when you came.

But, please do expect that people will be talking about how great you were for hundreds of years to come.