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“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
To create legacy, you need to learn how to focus on what is important and eliminate everything else. In particular, your focus needs to be directed almost entirely on working towards your legacy goal. This is what I call legacy focus.
Legacy focus can only come after you have done your legacy sampling, and have decided once and for all what your legacy goal is. Start your legacy focus too early, and you end up having to start all over again once you realise your mistake. However, once you have found your legacy goal, you have to get out of sampling mode and apply legacy focus to it.
Getting rid of all the non-essential stuff in our lives is difficult. This is especially the case if we keep comparing ourselves to our peers who have resigned themselves to the 9-5 lifestyle and need all the extra stuff to make them feel like their decision is necessary. But for those of us who want to create legacy, all the extra stuff detracts from our legacy focus.
What kind of extra stuff am I talking about? It comes in three categories:
- The first category is commitments we take on that do not help us progress with our legacy goal (e.g. becoming the treasurer of our local church; agreeing to meet up with a friend for coffee every week; taking on a skills class out of interest rather than because we need it for our legacy goal).
- The second category is made up of all the junk we accumulate in our lives, that leads to a loss of resources which would be better spent on our legacy goal. A heavy mortgage, or owning a car in a smallish city, are just two examples – both expensive and tying us down instead of freeing up our resources and our mobility. And then of course there’s all the other, smaller pieces of junk we accumulate, which ends up cluttering our space and draining us of mental energy.
- The third category is an overlap between the other two: it is the commitment to buy useless junk for other people. This of course takes up both the time we need to find the stuff, and the money it takes to buy it. Piles of gifts we have to buy every Christmas for our loved ones is a personal pet hate of mine. Half the stuff ends up in the bin or in charity shops, and all the time spent on finding it is wasted.
As you can see, sticking with our legacy focus leads to being a somewhat difficult person, who does not go for all the senseless garbage we take into our lives every day out of politeness. Legacy focus takes not only determination, but the willingness to be seen as rude and anti-social. Are you up for that, and all the social ostracism that inevitably ensues?
The time is now.
‘Look and you will find it – what is unsought will go undetected.’ Sophocles
Here are 6 key points to finding your Hedgehog Concept:
1. The key is to understanding what you can be the best in the world at, and also what you cannot be the best at – not what you want to be the best at. The Hedgehog Concept is not a goal, a strategy, or intention; it is an understanding.
2. If you cannot be the best in the world at what you are doing at the moment, then what you are doing at the moment cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept
3. The ‘best in the world’ understanding is a much more severe standard than a core competence. You might have a competence but not necessarily have the capacity to be truly the best in the world at that competence. Conversely, there may be activities at which you could become the best in the world, but at which you have no current competence
4. Set your goals and strategies based on understanding, not bravado
5. Getting the Hedgehog Concept is an iterative process. The Collins study found that it took four years on average for the good-to-great companies to get a Hedgehog Concept. The process might be quicker for an individual, but don’t count on it.
6. You do not need to be in a great industry to produce sustained great results. In the study, no matter how bad the industry, every good-to-great company figured out how to produce truly superior economic returns.
The time is now.
‘It’s not what’s happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it’s your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you’re going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.’ Anthony Robbins
Isaiah Berlin extrapolated from the fox and hedgehog parable to divide people into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are ‘scattered and diffused, moving on many levels,’ says Berlin, never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organising idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple – almost simplistic – hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.
So why is it better to be a hedgehog than a fox? Princetown Professor Martin Bressler pointed out the power of the hedgehog in a study of successful companies. He maintains that being a hedgehog is what separates those companies who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart. Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam smith and the division of labour – they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and simplified it. According to Bressler, ‘those who leave the biggest footprints have thousands calling after them, “Good idea, but you went too far!”‘ But as a result of their (often controversial) unifying concept, these others are commenting on their work and therefore making it spread like wildfire.
In the book ‘Good to great’, Jim Collins and his research team found that those who built great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what the team came to call a hedgehog concept, which I will talk about in the next post. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage that being a hedgehog provides, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.
Think carefully about your tendencies – whether you are more like a hedghog than a fox. Does your passion change with the wind, do you keep chasing dream after dream but never really completing anything? Be careful if this is the case – you are wasting precious time. Remember - hedghogs tend to leave the biggest footprint. Find what it is that you really want, and stick to it.
The time is now.
‘It is simply a matter of doing what you do best and not worrying about what the other fellow is going to do.’ John Adams
In today’s blog post, I will continue talking about the theme of passion in relation to creating legacy by telling you a story about the fox and the hedgehog.
There is an ancient Greek parable which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The fox is a cunning creature, able to devise a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox circles around the hedgehog’s den, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty – the fox looks like the sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a dowdier creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.
The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail. The hedgehog, minding his own business, wanders right into the path of the fox. ‘Aha, I’ve got you now!’ thinks the fox. He leaps out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks, ‘Here we go again. Will he ever learn?’ Rolling up into a perfect little ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The fox, bounding towards his prey, sees the hedgehog defence and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest, the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, some version of his battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place, and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.
Which one of these are you? In the next blog post, I will reveal what makes ‘hedgehog thinking’ so unique, and why in case you are a fox you might want to become a hedgehog.
The time is now.
‘I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.’ Eartha Kitt
In the last blog post, I outlined three reasons why following your passion is smart, especially when it comes to creating legacy. But what if you don’t yet know what your true passion is? What if you find lots of things fascinating, but don’t yet know enough about them to be able to decide which of these is your true passion? If this sounds familiar, you may have to do some legacy sampling.
Legacy sampling is a period of time in which you try out different things in order to find your true passion. This may take a number of years (my legacy sampling phase lasted 3 years), or it may be relatively quick.
When legacy sampling, aim to do two things:
1. Gather as much in-depth experience in as many fields as possible. This knowledge will later help you when pursuing your legacy goal by providing you with an understanding of the way in which different areas of work are connected.
2. Constantly refine what it is you are after long-term. What gets you excited to get up in the morning? What are you particularly good at? What are you particularly bad at? What do other people think about your skills?
Enjoy the process of legacy sampling. Once you find your true passion, decide on a legacy goal, and start working on legacy projects towards that goal, you will no longer have much time to dabble into so many diverse fields of activity. So the legacy sampling phase is a time during which serendipity is your muse, gradually guiding you towards your true calling. Don’t rush this phase, and keep listening to what your heart is telling you.
The time is now.
‘It is foolish to postpone enjoyment of your ordinary life until you are more successful, more secure, or more loved than you are today.’ Timothy Ray Miller
In his book The Monk and the Riddle, entrepreneur Randy Komisar warns against going for what he calls ‘the deferred life plan’. The term, as Randy Komisar uses it, refers to choosing careers, projects etc. that we think will lead to financial stability, and postponing what we really want to do with our life until an undefined time in the future when we finally feel we can afford it.
According to Randy Komisar, the deferred life plan does not pay off, regardless of how driven you are. For starters, what happens if despite all your effort and hard work you do not reach the big promotion or the big salary you were hoping for? Also, is financial security really worth sacrificing the best years of your life for an indefinite time in the future? How much is your time worth? And when will you consider yourself to be financially secure? Bigger paychecks often lead to a more expensive lifestyle and therefore higher expenses – financial security is relative. Most importantly of all: why not work hard because you find the work meaningful, rather than so you can move on to the next thing?
The concept of the deferred life plan is highly relevant to thinking about your legacy project, particularly in light of our discussion of failure over the last few blog posts. It is often the case that when a legacy project fails, the legacy creator starts having second doubts about dedicating their life to creating legacy instead of settling for something safe and predictable. Seeing your peers in cushy jobs and going on expensive holidays doesn’t help - especially when you’re barely making ends meet while having to deal with failure and the ‘I told you so’ stares of those around you. And worse than that, you start doubting yourself, your own abilities, your vision for the future.
So amidst all this, the deferred life plan starts looking better by the minute. ‘I’ll go back into a safe job for a couple of years - once I’m financially stable enough, I’ll go back to creating legacy’, you tell yourself. There’s nothing wrong with wanting safety and predictability in your life – most of us do. And if going into a safe job will tie you over for a while, fine. But don’t postpone creating legacy until that job is over, or until you feel you are financially stable.
Start your next legacy project as soon as you can mentally handle it – in parallel with your safe job, if you must. Don’t let a single day pass by when you are not working on creating legacy, when you are not either planning for or doing work on a legacy project. Otherwise, you are not using your safe job to make creating legacy possible – instead, you are simply deluding yourself by adopting the deferred life plan. The couple of years become a couple of decades, and a couple of decades more – and before you know it, it is too late.
The time is now.
‘Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.’ Seneca
One of the best ways to see the failure of your legacy project is as a new beginning.
Think about it. You’ve failed. You’re at your lowest. Things can’t get much worse than they are now. This is the best time to start something new and bold. It is the dawn of a new, awe-inspiring chapter in your life. Don’t miss this opportunity. Grab it with both hands.
The time is now.
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