Legacy is all about powerful, positive leadership.  It is about looking forward, thinking long-term, and creating something sustainable – not just focused on current income, but on long term value. 

I found a quote recently that aptly addresses all these considerations.  As a lawyer, I found the source to be quite remarkable, though not surprising.  While coming from an entirely different ethnic background and part of the planet, I share many Native American philosophies on living and working in harmony with our planet Earth – and in tune with what they call Great Spirit.

So what is this legacy wisdom – this significant piece of enlightened leadership?  It’s this:

“In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions
on the next seven generations.”
(From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy)

How would your life and your work be different if this was your decision-making focus?  What would you be doing differently? How quickly can you shift to that mindset and make the changes you need to make? 

The world is waiting for your own exercise of real power – the power to do good while doing well, and the power to positively impact the people around you and those who follow (and who follow them, and follow them, and follow them …).  Are you up for that challenge? 

Our 7 Steps To Creating Your Legacy program has been a joy to deliver – and to watch what participants develop from there.  Keep an eye on the site to get details on how you can do something different in your work and life to incorporate this wisdom and make a positive impact on your partcular corner of this world!  Sign up for the Creating Legacy Kit (top right) and we’ll keep you posted on upcoming events.

Here’s to a better planet 7 generations from now – heck, hopefully yet during this generation!  Cheers, Dolly

So far we’ve talked about a legacy project starting with an idea and as it takes on mass, it grows. Included in that growth is a definition of the roles and processes it takes to become a reality so the project can unfold smoothly, deliver its benefits and then others can carry it on without your direct involvement. In that way …

Great Legacies Are Enduring. The project takes shape and each aspect of it is developed with an identifiable and replicable method – a system that others can learn, teach to many others and have any important course corrections along the way. Your legacy begins to take on a life of its own.

Part of the process is to build a network around you.  Others who are moved by your project want to be involved, ususally in a very collaborative way too. From there, it can develop exponentially. The money needed to build it appears, either because you can contribute it or because funding is available from others – or both. Professional services needed to expand the project are identified (and may even be contributed).

The other people who show up to help operate it and carry it on will also allow you to let go. You can step away, knowing it will continue as designed, to accomplish its defined mission and create a benefit for the intended recipients that can last for many future generations. 

Templates, and tons of existing resources, exist to help you create your legacy. Starting with only your passion, your good and beneficial idea can be developed using time-tested structures and methods that allow you to get it started, involve others in a systematic way, stay involved as long as you like and then step aside to allow it to continue to make a positive enduring difference in the world.

Add the following to your Legacy Notebook under “Element 12 – Enduring”:

• Is there a template out there – another individual and/or their existing organization or business operation – that is doing the sort of thing you’d like your project to do?
• Or is there someone else or an organization that’s doing something completely different, but whose process could be applied to get the sort of results you’d like to bring about?
• Write down the ones that come to mind, and as you notice more, jot them down here, too.

Here’s to your best life…
Cheers!

Dolly and Eliza

PBS has amazing programs!  We all really need to watch that channel more often!

In celebration of being on the air 30 years, PBS through its Nightly Business Report (NBR) program,  collaborated (one of my favorite words!) with the Wharton School of business at University of Pennsylvania and its Knowledge@Wharton website on innovation and entrepreneurship.  Their goal: to identify the 30 innovations that have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years.

The resulting program, the Top 30 Innovations of the Last 30 Years, is also featured on both the Wharton and PBS websites.   NBR program viewers in over 250 markets across the U.S. and Knowledge@Wharton readers from around the world submitted some 1200 suggestions for the best innovations they thought had shaped the world in that time.  A panel of eight judges from Wharton selected the top 30.  A fascinating list to check out — true legacies all.

This got me to thinking about my favorite teacher R. Buckminster Fuller, the man who coined the term “Spaceship Earth” and the phrase ”doing more with less.”  He encouraged people to create artifacts – very much a personal legacy concept.

Bucky’s stated intention – as a lifelong experiment with his own life, made as a conscious decision in his early 30′s - was “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone.”

He answered the question of why there were humans in the universe, with the notion that we are basically local information gatherers and problem solvers.  While we are more complex than that, it is an accurate observation.

Bucky focused his life on solving complex problems through an approach he called “comprehensive anticipatory design science.” The approach emphasized individual initiative and integrity, whole systems thinking, scientific rigor and faithful reliance on nature’s underlying principles.

He thought it was not helpful to try to change people, but rather important to change the context in which they operate, by providing innovative solutions to the problems they face.  That way, ultimately no one would have to work to ‘earn a living’ (we are, after all, already alive), but we would each contribute what we’re good at to positively impact the world around us: gathering information about and solving the problems that presented themselves uniquely to us.

What if we did more of that?  What if you took a look at what you do well and easily and even take joy in doing, and looked around to see who you could assist by creating something that would benefit them in some way?

If your brain is already spinning with ideas, you are developing a legacy consciousness.  Building anything from that thinking would make the planet a bit better place.

If what you build happens to answer Bucky’s urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all.  If it:

• “emphasizes a new design, material, process, service, tool, technology, or any combination”
• “is part of an integrated strategy dealing with key social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues”
• “present[s] a bold, visionary, tangible initiative that is focused on a well-defined need of critical importance [and is]
• regionally specific yet globally applicable, and backed up by a solid plan and the capability to move the solution forward”

Then you might even win the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, as stated on the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s (bfi.org) website.

My ultimate joy at Creating Legacy would be to work side by side with you in helping you do just that, or even some fraction of that, which, in your own unique way “makes a difference now that lasts for generations.”

I’d love to hear your ideas.

I recently wrote about Legacy-Level Holiday Gift-Giving Ideas.  (If you missed it, you can read it here.)  What makes something legacy-level gift giving?  Much like  legacies themselves, this level of gift-giving makes a positive difference – particularly, hopefully, a sustainable or long-term one and/or one that keeps on giving.  

A number of the gift ideas in that article may not have seemed to make a tangible, sustainable difference directly.  The point was to give with a small environmental footprint. So the legacy aspect of it was in what the gift ideas don’t do – they don’t add to waste and overconsumption, so they help promote long term environmental sustainability. 

While ultimately practical and maybe not what folks would think of as really “sexy” or “magical” gifts, I just found a similar article that provides some additional alternative holiday gift ideas – as in alternative energy approaches.  See Great Green Gift Ideas That Will Save You Money and Help the Environment to check out these practical, alternative gems.

So maybe you don’t want to use one of these gift ideas to that fabulous new person you’re dating and whose heart you’re trying to win.  They may still be great for family members, those people on your list who “have everything” — or even as gifts for yourself (and that fabulous new date may well be practical and environmentally minded …).  Since these gifts are good for environmental protection and ultimately help create a more sustainable planet, you may well be regarded as a real visionary and trend-setter - indeed, an impressive enlighted leader in your own right - through a very practical approach to legacy-level gift giving.  That demonstration of leadership might just create a following, with people replicating your example, making your gift idea one that keeps on giving as well.

Going into the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, which begins this coming week, I am feeling a bit dismayed, despite the fact that more and more common sensical and educated folks (like the 181 investors referenced in the title) are displaying a willingness to come forward in the climate change discussion and call on world leaders to get a grip and begin to do something about it. 

I am dismayed because telling the truth seems to be such a hard thing to do – because people are afraid of what will happen if they do.  Yet, as we are taught (just maybe not taught well enough how to practice), honesty is still the best policy.  It lessens the need for “spin” and opens the door to debate – hopefully honest debate without conniving trickery.  Having practiced law, I can, unfortunately attest to the existence of both conniving tactics and trickery in what is supposed to be high level honest debate built on a foundation of professional integrity.  Anyone who reads or watches any news also knows that people often read and watch whatever supports their underlying beliefs and attempted assertions - rather than staying open to and dealing directly with the sometimes not so pleasant actual truth. 

I say all this because in the past couple weeks thousands of emails and files were hacked from scientists inside East Anglia University, the British keeper of global temperature records, revealing at best a fearful reluctance among them to reveal all their scientific data and their efforts to disguise data that give rise to questions about human caused global warming.  Presumably, they do such things to divert the attacks of critics – when it would just be better to put it out there and well … honestly debate.   See more on that story here. (The hackers, of course, are still unidentifed and at large, and following their actions have been others who have attempted to post outright false information online to persuade people further in their beliefs that there is no environmental problem going on and we should stop making such a potentially expensive fuss about it).

Genuinely concerned scientists and environmentally minded citizens like myself have recently had to divert their focused attention from environmental protection, to defending the need for environmental protection.  This is despite plenty of real evidence that humans have seriously degraded the planet – jeeze just go to your nearest water body and have a look at it: wanna swim in that?  how about taking a nice long drink? 

And why and how did we get here? It’s a result of fear – it always comes down to fear even if it parades as greed and arrogance – of telling the truth in the first instance. That results in back peddling, having to explain, being diverted from the real, important issues, and feeling like you have to justify.  And worse, having to work harder to get a clear message to people whose beliefs cause them to be grounded in denial and avoidance to begin with. 

Yet, the truth, however it comes out – and it generally does - eventually leads to some level of honest debate among truly open and concerned persons, even though spinmeisters know that creating diversions can delay that debate.  Hence the old saying “justice delayed is justice denied,” a problem that ultimately be avoided if we would just do a better job of practicing telling the truth and treating each other compassionately. 

And the truth is that pumping carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, in to our atmosphere IS a problem and it needs to be corrected.  Even scientists who criticize alleged ”government by the few” or a handful of “elites” — like the members of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been called – conclude that hidden and hacked emails or not, global climate change (a lot more than mere “warming”) is still a problem.  It is not a matter of how much carbon based fossil fuel is left in the ground and how we can exploit every last drop.  It is a matter of whether we should continue to pump that carbon into the atmosphere and poison our planet – or begin to move, as rapidly as possible, into production of clean energy alternatives and more effective conservation efforts. 

Not surprising as a result of the East Anglia email hacking debacle, I heard a report on the radio this morning that some religious leaders have started speaking out against efforts to address climate change, claiming that our creator endowed us with an earth that is resilient.  I have no qualms with them.  But best I’ve been taught, our creator also gave us free will, and that free will may be causing serious harm and deterioration to this garden and paradise we were given in the form of the earth.  I agree the earth is resilient and will be just fine – what I question is what will happen to life on earth (humans and other species, which are so very threatened and disappearing at alarming rates as a result of humans’ exercise of free will).  While I don’t completely agree with George Carlin’s suggestions in his “The Planet is Fine” comedy sketch that we should do nothing to address it, I do agree with his underlying premise.  We may destroy our species and life on the planet as we know it, but the earth itself will be fine.  But I have serious questions about what will happen to ‘we the people’ – so many of whom are failing miserably at living up to being made in God’s image and likeness.

Yet, from the business world we have some enlightened leaders:  Ceres (pr. “series”), is a U.S. network of investors, environmental organizations and public interest groups with a stated mission to integrate sustainability into capital markets for the health of the planet and its people.  They recently reported some seriously good news:  the world’s largest group of global investors has issued a joint call for U.S. and international policy makers to take strong action to address global climate change.  

What a pleasant experience to find such enlightened leadership within the financial industry – which often takes a bad rap for greedily focusing on profit over anything else.  Head of one of the investment group members recognized publically that the human cost of inaction is unthinkable, and called for the development of sustainable business practices.  Just goes to show, there are reputable, high integrity professionals in all industries (even as there are those gripped by fear and acting badly …).

And from the religious world come some enlightened leaders, too, who see global climate change as a possible threat to peace.  Religions for Peace is the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition. In September, the organization participated in the sixty-fourth session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.  Their purpose was to help promote a binding global climate deal at the UN Climate Change conference this next week.  Hallelujah!

The upside?  Dismayed or not, I can always find some good news.  I’m so grateful for that.