At Quartz Mark Manson presents five rules (or “levels”) for winning the game of life:
Level 1 – Find food; find a bed to sleep in at night
Level 2 – Know you’re not going to die
Level 3 – Find your people
Level 4 – Do something that’s important and valuable to both yourself and others
Level 5 – Create a legacy
For those of you who don’t recognize it, that’s a restatement of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
I had Levels 1 and 2 licked by the time I was 17. I haven’t been nearly as successful with the others. By most standards I’ve failed at Level 5.
Unless this blog has informed people and change some minds, in which case I may never know. It could be that my dogs have created my legacy. Ah well, they also serve, etc.
I would add one reminder to his advice: the house always wins.
“Unless this blog has informed people….”
I’d say that’s a fair statement and worthy facet of legacy.
Except for relatives, most people are forgotten after 10 years, and even for relatives, few people will be remembered after 20 years.
Today, few people feel any connection to the past, and most think that the present course of time is unprecedented. Today, most people really believe that history is not something to be informed by. They believe that history is something to be chained to, and thus, most of the past must be rejected.
If anything, they believe that history is the roadmap to disaster, and even remembering it can lead to disaster.
I am more Confucian than that. Yesterday I was corresponding with two different people about shared great-great-grandparents.
I think what you have done here is being passed on elsewhere more than you think. I certainly pass on some of your ideas. (I had not thought that a legacy would matter at all to me but as I get closer to retirement I find that I cherish some of what I think will be left behind.)
Steve