Monday Morning

Motivation    10/10/2011

THE POSITIVE PLACE. SALES MOTIVATION AND PERSONAL GROWTH

Crafting a legacy

A couple of hours before I started writing this, it was announced that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died. His death brings to mind the fact that we all need to control and create our own legacy, just the same way as he managed and created his.

From his trademark turtleneck to his attention to detail, Jobs turned Apple Inc. into the world’s largest retailer of music -- but more than that, he pushed his way into changing much of the way people react and act towards the world about them. Whether you use Apple products or not, much of the way you interact with technology is the result of design decisions pushed by Steve Jobs.

It shows what a person can do when determined to establish a vision for the future, and we should all remember that no matter how insignificant we may appear to be, we can determine a vision for our future, and share that vision to help guide the people around us.

Our legacy should be something we plan. We need to determine a path and follow it -- leaving behind us any parts that don’t seem to fit. We need to make our planned path so obvious to us that we will have no problem at all staying on it.

In short, we need to visualize our trip before we take it, and then follow that path to the excellence the our lives deserve.

Most of us will never do this -- we’ll let the twists and turns of life itself determine what our legacy will be. As a result, our life’s legacy will appear to be a bunch of random decisions, chosen on the spur of the moment, and never with a great deal of thought. We will accomplish little with such a path -- because the path twists and turns so often, doubling back on itself, and then sprinting off in another direction -- that we never quite get to a chosen destination.

I’ve been quite the fan of meandering when possible in car trips -- but in our lives, meandering about is strictly something we should try to minimize. We need to decide where we wish to get to, how we’re going to get there, and then do it.

We may not be the kind of global technology leader like Steve Jobs, but we can be a leader in our own areas of expertise, or in our own family or corporate environment. We can craft our own legacy to make it what we wish it to become.

Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.