Legacy is a Strange Ambition.
Plenty of motivated people want to leave something behind. They want to build something that lasts or share an idea that echoes through time. Some farmers wish to leave their soil richer than they found it. Some home builders want to create homes that will shelter generations.
Entrepreneurs often sit at the center of this. They are painted as the most driven members of society. Risk takers. Builders. But how many of them actually escape the grind?
The stereotype looks like this:
- Sacrifice family and health to make the business work.
- Put off kids or miss the T-ball years.
- Chase growth because "if you're not growing, you're dying."
In theory, they’ve left the rat race. In practice, they’ve just stepped onto a faster hamster wheel with fewer guardrails.
Sure, the payoff could be big. But at what cost?
I’m not here to say one way is right or wrong. There’s room in this world for just about every approach to life. But when it comes to legacy, I think we often get distracted. Most of us will not change the world in grand, obvious ways. Few of us will build companies that last for centuries.
More of us, though, can leave our little corners of the world better than we found them. And almost all of us can chase the clearest, most time-tested legacy there is: raising good kids.
Not everyone will choose that path. But for me, without that, none of the other stuff really matters. 
