Defining Legacy

In April, my business celebrates its 6th official birthday.

I started taking on some side development work and projects for friends 7 or 8 months prior to making the big leap away from my non-profit job and into working for myself. Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

In the past 6 years, I have grown and learned so much. You have to if you want your business to be successful.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Things go wrong, team members make mistakes, there are misunderstandings and problems that creep up unexpected along the way. But there’s a lot that goes right too.

For the past year, I’ve been thinking about ways to share the knowledge I’ve collected with other business owners. I’d like others to have an advantage I didn’t have, to have a collective of people to support and encourage them, to use what I’ve learned to help others.

I find myself wondering what my legacy is going to be.

I don’t have a neatly packaged answer to the question of legacy yet. Some people leave a company a behind, some people leave children. Others leave works of arts or books or a poem. Mother Teresa taught us compassion, Maya Angelou taught us about courage, Mary Oliver gave us little snippets that reminded us to find the wonder in the world.

What will my legacy be? What will the lessons of my life lead me to share?

It’s beyond business how-to’s for me. It goes deeper. All I have ever done has been in the name of freedom, of figuring out what freedom looks like and feels like. So many of us are not free. So many of us are but cannot see it.

So maybe I start there, with simply finding the common themes that have guided me forward for years…