‘ To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.’  George MacDonald

Creating legacy and engendering trust

Ambitious legacy projects often require the input of more than one individual. If you are a legacy creator in need of help, you therefore need to learn how to engender trust. In other words, you will have to become a trust agent, a term used by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith in their excellent book by the same title.

What being a trust agent entails

As Chris and Julien emphasise, being a trust agent is something that can be learnt, it’s not necessarily something you have to be born with. Here are six defining characteristics of ‘fully formed’ trust agents:

1. Making your own game. Trust agents, like most legacy creators, are particularly good at getting things off the ground without the gatekeepers. Bit by bit, their pioneering work becomes known by others who want to join them.

 2. Becoming ‘one of us’. Trust agents have a knack for getting people to identify with them. They do this by being highly aware of the unwritten rules of the community they are targetting, and behaving in such a way as not to upset the sensibilities of the people within that community.

 3. Using leverage. Trust agents often use something they have accomplished as leverage for more visibility with their next project. This again is something that legacy creators are also very good at, and yet another reason why legacy creators are well-suited to becoming trust agents.

 4. Becoming Agent Zero. Trust agents are good at being at the centre of wide, powerful networks. They do so by jumping at the chance to meet others online and at events, and connecting these new acquaintances with other people. This is course is strongly connected to leverage, as such networks are then highly useful in leveraging previous projects to reach more recognition with one’s current legacy project.

 5. Being a human artist. Trust agents are excellent at learning how to work well with people, empowering them, and recognising their strengths and weaknesses. They know when to improve relationships and when to step away, thereby constantly increasing the number of people who are willing to help them out on a project.

 6. Building an army. Trust agents are skilled at getting large groups of people together, to collaborate on specific legacy projects. When you can get a large group to collaborate, you can achieve monumental tasks that may have been previously impossible.

Are you a trust agent? How do you go about gaining people’s trust in your ability to lead a legacy project through to completion?

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‘Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.’  Orison Swett Marden 

Creating legacy and small opportunities

Creating legacy is about making the very best of whatever happens to you. There’s no such thing as a small opportunity; there are just ‘opportunities’, which you can make the best of or not.

Every opportunity helps you flex your legacy muscles

Never underestimate the value of small challenges to flexing your legacy muscles. Such challenges provide excellent avenues for deliberate practice. 

By overcoming small challenges, you are elevating the stakes for yourself, and what may look like an insurmountable obstacle today may look minuscule in a year’s time. This is the power of improving your ability to create legacy one small step at a time.

Small opportunities and building a reputation

Another reason to do your very best with every single opportunity that comes your way, no matter how small it may seem, is that you will build a reputation as someone who does their best.

Eventually, people will begin to call you and ask if they can help you on your next legacy projects; and gatekeepers will begin to take notice of you.

Therefore, treat every opportunity you have as a way of building a brand, of convincing people that you are worth rooting for.

How are you taking advantage of the opportunities that come your way?

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 ’It’s not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it’s what you put into the practice.’  Eric Lindross

Creating legacy and the need to practice

Creating legacy rarely happens by accident (even when it looks that way). Usually, legacy creators have to abide by the ten-year rule and use this time to continuously improve their craft through practice.

But not any kind of practice will lead to improvement. Decades of psychological research suggests that for practice activities to yield continuous improvements, they have to fall into the category of what researchers have come to call ‘deliberate practice.’ 

What deliberate practice is and isn’t

As researchers have argued,  what most of us think of as practice isn’t what researchers mean by deliberate practice. Let’s take a concrete example. Let’s say I’d like to create legacy through writing a series of essays that I intend to publish in book form. Therefore, my aim is to become the best essay-writer I can be; how do I do that?

Most of us would assume that the answer is to write essay after essay, hoping that this will increase the quality of the output. In fact, research suggests that this approach is wrong. Instead, what I have to do in order to become a better essay writer is to find out where my weaknesses lie with respect to essay writing; and then to engage in activities specifically designed to address those weaknesses.

So for example, I may find that one of my weaknesses with writing essays is my poor understanding of structure. This means that I need to find an activity that will focus on practicing structure.

An example of such an activity would be to read high-quality essays written by someone else; not look at the article for a few days; and then write out the structure of that essay if I were to write it. By continuously doing this with a wide range of essays, my understanding of structure would improve. Then I’d move on to another weakness and design an activity specifically designed to tackle that, and so on.

The 6 characteristics of deliberate practice

Okay, I know the concept of deliberate practice is quite complicated, so I’ve written a list of characteristics that I hope will help you decide whether an activity falls in the category of deliberate practice or not:

1. Deliberate practice is an activity designed specifically to improve performance. Deliberate practice requires that you identify sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on each of them separately. As soon as you record measurable improvement with one aspect, you can move on to the next.

2. Deliberate practice often requires a someone else’s (e.g. teacher/coach) help. There’s a reason why the world’s best golfers still go to teachers. One of the reasons goes beyond the teacher’s knowledge. It’s his or her ability to see you in ways that you cannot see yourself. Without a clear, unbiased view of your performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible.

3. Deliberate practice activities can be repeated a lot. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts.

4. Feedback on results is continuously available on deliberate practice activities. Practicing without feedback is like bowling through a curtain that hangs down to knee level. You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: you won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring. 

5. Deliberate practice activities are highly demanding mentally. This applies not only for activities that are intellectual, such as my essay-writing example, but also to activities that are heavily physical.

6. It isn’t much fun. Yep, that’s the bad part, and the main reason why there are so few top performers and legacy creators. The good news though is that if you stick with deliberate practice, you are bound to see a real improvement in your performance.

By the way, if you want a really in-depth explanation of deliberate practice, read Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. A terrific book with lots of examples of how deliberate practice has helped legacy creators and other top performers improve their work in a wide range of areas of endeavour.

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‘Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.’  Steven R. Covey

Creating legacy and behaviour patterns

In living our lives, most of us develop particular behaviour patterns. The extent to which we prepare for a job; the frequency with which we are late for appointments; the way in which we deal with circumstances in our lives that are beyond our control. Recognising such patterns in ourselves and others is invaluable for setting up legacy projects. 

Using patterns in choosing people to work with

 In hiring people to do a job, I have come to strongly rely on patterns. For example, I found that short-listing people with spelling mistakes on their CV tended to be a waste of my time; they tended to make an even worse impression on me in the interview, and were even late in some cases.

 Similarly, as soon as I hired someone, I would start the ‘hunt’ for their strengths and weaknesses through finding patterns in their behaviour. For example, I found that those who were great at juggling various commitments were less good at becoming an ‘expert’ within a particular area. Knowing this allowed me to assign people tasks that matched their particular tendencies.

 Twyla Tharp, one of the greatest choreographers of our time, writes in ‘The Creative Habit’: ‘I can size up a dancer and determine if he’s right for my company or project by the way he comes in the door and puts his bag down. That and asking him to come forward and move into fifth position will tell me all I need to know about his training, his attitude, his propriety and modesty, even his charisma.’ It’s true: our way of dealing with the world can be seen in our most minute gestures and habits.

Creating legacy through developing positive patterns

Not only do patterns help us choose the right people to work with on our legacy projects; becoming aware of our own behaviour patterns can help us prevent making the same mistakes over and over again.

A few years ago, I became aware that I had a tendency to start things with great enthusiasm, and then never finish them. I’d start writing a short story, and then abandon it after the first two pages; I’d start learning a new skill, and then stop as soon as I got bored with it. For someone wanting to create legacy like me, this pattern was a huge barrier.

So I set about changing that pattern. I took on fewer things, and then followed them through to the end, regardless of how I felt about them mid-way. I finished writing both my masters and my phd theses despite being sorely tempted to give up countless times. I kept on going to acting classes even after the novelty had worn off. And in the same spirit, I am writing my blog posts even on days like today, when I don’t feel like it.

What I’m suggesting is not that you keep on doing stuff when you don’t feel like it; some people would in fact benefit from not being so duty-bound and not finishing things once in a while. All I’m saying is that I had a particularly strong tendency of not carrying on with things after they were no longer new to me; so once I became aware of that, I decided to work towards changing this pattern in order to be better equipped for creating legacy.

What behaviour patterns are stopping you from creating legacy, and what are you doing about changing them?

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‘My father always told me just worry about the things you can control and don’t worry about anything else. I can’t control the number of games we play. As long as we keep playing the way we’re playing, that’s the most important thing to me.’  Brian Hill

Creating legacy and the control factor

Creating legacy is strongly connected to our ability to focus on the things we have control over, and disregard those things we cannot control.

It is of course important that you prepare before starting a legacy project, and that you have a plan for what you are hoping to achieve. But once the work on the legacy project starts, i.e. once our nicely defined plan meets reality, things are bound to change, often quite dramatically.

The ‘in my control vs. outwith my control’ list

Here’s a really simple and handy tool to figure out what you can and cannot control. Just grab a big sheet of paper and split it into two colums. In the first column, list the things connected to your legacy project that are within your control. In the second column, list those things that are outwith your control.

For example, on my list I’ve got things like ‘discipline’ and ‘persistence’ in the ‘within my control’ column; and I can of course break these general concepts down into concrete actions, such as ‘work on my legacy project Mon-Fri for 1 hour, from 10 to 11 am’ and ’send out my funding application for the legacy project to one potential funder each week’.

Now, this is the most basic version of the list. Here is an extra layer of complexity: split the list into two rows, making one about short-term concerns and the other about long-term concerns connected to your legacy project. This means you will end up with four squares: ‘within my control – short term’; ‘within my control – long term’; ‘outwith my control short term’ and ‘outwith my control – long term’.

Try making a list like this for yourself and let me know how you get on. Also, what other tools do you use to keep focused on those things you can actually control, in working on your legacy project?

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‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. ’  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Creating legacy and working with others

You cannot complete a legacy project on your own. Whether you need practical help, emotional help, or even just inspiration, you need a supportive network around you to help you get through the dark times and enjoy the good ones.

Do you need inspiration on how to build a supportive network? Here’s a list of 12 tips that work for me:

1. Build win-win situations. Whenever you meet someone with potential, think of ways in which you may be able to collaborate with that person so you each have something to gain. Talented people are a lot more likely to help you if they can further their own aims while doing so.

2. Be human. People are much more likely to help if you treat them as people, not just a means to getting your legacy project completed. Take a keen interest in the people you’d like to include in your supportive network, and you may find that some of them will volunteer to help without you having to ask them.  

3. Build mutual trust. Trust is the most important aspect of supportive networks, so you should only include people you can trust and who trust you back. Otherwise, you will miss opportunities of making the most of people’s talents and your legacy projects will suffer as a result.

4. Make people passionate about your cause. It is much easier to motivate people to work hard on your legacy project if you can make them passionate about it. So when deciding on your legacy project, ask yourself if it is something other people could also believe in.

5. Be a role model to others and they will follow. Don’t delay starting your legacy project due to lack of help. Get things going yourself, and set an example to others. If what you are trying to achieve is inspiring, you’ll soon find followers.

6. Chit-chat is important to establish rapport. Don’t forget the value of establishing a rapport with people before asking for their help. Chit-chat may seem like a waste of time when you’re in a rush and just want to get something done, but when it comes to getting someone’s help it’s invaluable. And don’t forget point no. 2: be human.

7. Become a gatekeeper. In building your supportive network, remember that one of the roles you’ll have to embrace is to protect people within the network from parasites and leeches. Otherwise, you’ll find that people are leaving your network due to being ‘assaulted’ by others for various favours.

8. Learn to be assertive and friendly. This is a very difficult combination to master, so don’t worry if it takes you a while before getting the balance right. Basically, what you’re aiming for is for people to like working with you while respecting your boundaries and the needs of the project.

9. Never forget the people who helped you once you succeed. Your supportive network will be vital if your legacy project becomes a success. Remember the people who have helped you, and ask them to keep you grounded; they’re the ones who stuck by you when things were rough, so you can trust them far more than the people who only took an interest in you once you made it.

10. Don’t use people. No matter how important your project is to you, there is no excuse for using people. Treat anyone who helps you with the respect they deserve.  

11. Make the first move to give. Don’t just ask people for help; offer to help them first. We are all biased into helping those who help us, so as long as you don’t target parasites and leeches don’t worry about people abusing your generosity. We all like helping those whom we perceive as nice and friendly, so the more you give the more people will want to help you get your legacy project through to completion.

12. Leverage the power of many. Don’t ask for a lot from only a handful of people. If you’ve got a large supportive network, asking people to do only one task will add up to an enormous amount of progress very fast – which is why it is important to be good at building a strong wide network in the first place. Asking lots of people to do only one or two things that are easy for them to do means that you can keep more control over the direction over your legacy project, plus it means you’re not running the risk of getting people exhausted while helping you out.

How are you building your supportive network? Any more ideas would be very welcome.

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‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’  Oscar Wilde

Creating legacy and (not) fitting in

From a very young age, we’re told we have to fit in. Whether it’s our family, our classroom, our peers – the messages we get are usually about comforming to the crowd rather than standing out.

In Australia, they have the term ‘tall poppy syndrome’ to refer to someone who stands out and is therefore taken down by their peers; the lesson there is not to stand out too much or you’ll be taken down.

Creating legacy may make it difficult for you to fit in

Now, the trouble is that if you set your sights on creating legacy, chances are that you won’t be fitting in too well; you’ll be the tall poppy that others will want to take down. And if your legacy project does not become successful in the conventional sense of the word (i.e. bring you money, fame, and lasting glory), people will enjoy making fun of you even more for having dared to do something different with your life.

So, if you’d like to go down the path of creating legacy, you’ve got to seriously consider the consequences of your decision for your ability to fit in. There are of course legacy creators who seem to fit in despite following an unconventional lifestyle. Elizabeth Gilbert, for example, author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about how she tends to immediately make friends no matter where she is and what she is up to. But most of us legacy creators don’t manage to make our unconventional lifestyles as inconspicuous. So we stick out like a sore thumb.

Ask yourself this question

The question you’ve got to ask yourself is: is creating legacy worth the risk of not fitting in? There is no right or wrong answer; it depends entirely on you. But it’s probably best you ask yourself this question before you begin on the path of creating legacy, otherwise you may find yourself constantly zig-zagging between trying to fit in and making the tough choices that creating legacy often requires.

Do you think that creating legacy makes fitting in difficult?

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‘Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.’  Richard Bach

Creating legacy and managing your diary

Creating legacy is strongly dependent on your ability to free up time in your diary. For most of us, it seems that we already have so many urgent appointments, deadlines etc. that we couldn’t possibly take the time for something as long-term as working on a legacy project.

I have already blogged about how to minimise emergencies by working on tasks in reverse order of urgency. I have previously also argued that one way to free up time for creating legacy is to decrease the number of commitments we take on. Today I’d like to take this idea further and look at ways to free up time by minimising commitments relating to other people.

Two types of time commitments

In the big scheme of things, there are two kinds of commitments we take on: commitments that relate to other people and commitments we take on ourselves (legacy projects fall into this category).

The commitments that relate to other people consist of things such as meetings, deadlines for taking particular actions, and small duties such as replying to emails and other paperwork that come our way.

Commitments relating to other people may take longer than expected

One of the problems with such commitments is that we usually underestimate the time required to fulfil them properly. For example, when scheduling a one-hour meeting we usually think in our heads ‘this means I’ve got another 7 hours left in the day to do other work’ (if you happen to work 8-hour days). But this is totally misleading.

For instance, the ‘one hour meeting equals one hour of my time’ does not take into account the time it takes you to get to the meeting and back. For example, it may take you half an hour to get to the meeting and another half hour to get back.

You also need to take into account the time you waste just before leaving and just after returning. It is often the case that at least a quarter of an hour before you are due to leave for the meeting you may start getting fidgety about the time, and it will take you at least another quarter of an hour when you return to settle back into work.

This means that in practical terms, that one hour meeting has actually taken at least 2.5 hours out of your 8 hours that day. If you’ve got two one-hour meetings that day – you do the maths.  

Similar problems apply to other types of commitments relating to others. Emails take longer to write than you think, phonecalls extend beyond what you thought, reports take longer to write etc.

Commitments relating to other people are ‘anchored’ in your diary

Another big problem relating to commitments relating to other people is that once taken on, you cannot easily shift them to suit your particular circumstances at any particular time. If you haven’t slept well that night and are therefore feeling unproductive, but realise you have two meetings that day plus your legacy project time allotment, you will go to the meetings and postpone your legacy work.

Doing it the other way around would cause lots of friction with other people and would soon lead to being branded unreliable; so you prefer to be unreliable with something that only you know about. This makes sense in terms of social etiquette etc., but it does mean that you are attending to short-term at the expense of the long-term.

How do you solve these problems?

Based on the above, there are two steps you can take:

1. Be careful when taking on any form of commitment that relates to someone else. Especially when it comes to meetings, always ask yourself things like ‘is this meeting really necessary?’ and see if you can find an alternative whenever possible. Also, do not readily accept admin and other such tasks without asking ‘why is it me that has to deal with this?’ if this isn’t immediately obvious. It is  often to your advantage to establish yourself as difficult when it comes to agreeing to take on extra work; this means you will be able to provide better quality on the work that you do agree to take on.

2. Be realistic about how long a commitment relating to other people will take. When you schedule a meeting in your diary, immediately put in a generous estimate of the time you will need to get there and back, plus the fidgety time before and after travel, so you do not count on that time in your day for doing other work. Being aware of how long something takes will also give you extra ammunition should someone try to question you on why you are not taking on a particular commitment in step 1; you will be able to give them a very accurate estimate of what you already have taken on and therefore justify why you cannot possibly take on more commitments. Providing a valid justification is more socially acceptable than a blunt ‘no’, so go for that whenever you can.

What about you?

How do you deal with commitments relating to other people? How do you make sure you have enough time in your diary for creating legacy? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.

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‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’  Isaac Newton

When creating legacy, you have to be resourceful in building a supportive network  that will help you complete your legacy projects. Not all members of your supportive network need to know that they are helping you out. In fact, many of them may have never even heard of you, or may even be long gone. Here are three unconventional yet effective ways of proceeding:

1. Turn your rivals into mentors. Make your rivals be part of your supportive network, not just people who mean you well.

2. Use others’ success as pace-setters. Use the success of people you have never met but can read about as a standard by which to measure your own progress.

3. Role models. Use role models to create the ‘your are not alone’ feeling that you need in order to get over the hard times. These role models don’t need to have heard of you, they just need to be really inspirational and have gone through difficult times themselves.

 As you can see, you can still have a supportive network around you even when it seems like you are on your own.

What are your thoughts?

Can you think of other unconventional ways to have a supportive network? Share your ideas with us in the comments section.

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‘Friends are like melons; shall I tell you why? To find one good you must one hundred try.’  Claude Mermet

Parasites and leeches are people who live through others’ strength. If you include them in your supportive network, parasites and leeches will use some of your energy to support themselves.

 Parasites and leeches are generally weak and needy, and as you are most likely a strong individual (people who decide to work on their legacy are usually strong) they will soon try to use your strength to make up for their weaknesses.

 You may have parasites and leeches among your circle of friends, and as they are your friends you may be tempted to include them in your supportive network due to trusting them. Don’t be fooled. If you still want to keep them as your friends that is fine. They may be parasites and leeches in the workplace, but in the pub some of them make great drinking buddies – especially if you are keen to inflate your ego by comparing how well you are doing to how badly they are doing in life. But do not – I repeat: do not – allow them anywhere near your legacy projects.

 Parasites and leeches will of course ask you to be included in your supportive network, will show great enthusiasm for a while and say how this is different to any other work they have ever done and how it fills them with energy. But sooner or later, they will slip into their old habits and either destroy or seriously drain your project of resources.

 So the easiest thing is not to include parasites and leeches in your supportive network in the first place. If they keep asking, keep saying ‘no’ – they will sulk, but they know they need your strength in their lives, so don’t worry too much about losing them as drinking buddies. They will only leave you if they find someone else who wants to create legacy and is foolish enough to allow them to join their supportive network – in which case, pity the person whose supportive network they have joined.

 You may feel protective towards your parasite and leeches friends – that is a natural reaction from the strong to the weak, don’t fight it back. It’s okay to help them out if they need a tenner, but don’t jeopardise your legacy project by burdening it with their ineptitude. You have a task to fulfil – don’t let your parasite and leeches friends become yet another obstacle you have to overcome.

 The time is now.

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