What kind of legacy are you leaving? I’m not talking about family legacy, I’m talking about your daily work.
By doing our best today, we build our legacy for tomorrow. Doing quality work? Taking care of business? That’s how you’ll be remembered.
Doing sloppy work? Just enough to get by? Taking shortcuts? Then THAT’S how you’ll be remembered.
I’ve done my share of sloppy work in the past, but I hope I’ve learned my lesson. I wonder if karma exists?
If so, it bit me with a vengeance recently. I had to clean up the legacy of another consultant, and it was bad. We’re talking huge risks, data leaks, operational waste, lost sales… on and on and on.
The recovery effort took a month just to get off the ground, and will likely take a year and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The funny thing is I can almost see how it happened. A shortcut taken here, not resolved there, mixed-up priorities over there and, all of a sudden, the power of compounding kicked in.
How do you think that consultant will be remembered? Do you think they’ll be referred more business, or less?
Personally, it’s incidents like these that remind me of how important it is to do my best work now.
It’s easy to give in to the temptation to take a shortcut, or go watch SyFy (BSG, anyone? Dr. Who?) instead of “doing the needful.”
But building a legacy isn’t something that you just decide to do at a certain point in the future, and after a lot of planning.
No, it’s what you’re doing right here, right now, that determines how you’ll be remembered.
I’m not the flashiest person around, certainly not a huge personality. Tried all that, didn’t get far.
But I know that what I do right now DOES impact others. It impacts my family, my clients, and my friends.
At the end of the day, I don’t know that it matters how MANY people I impact, just HOW I impact those I do.
