The Legacy We Leave

For six of the last six weeks I have been on the road between Omaha and western Nebraska. My mom and dad have been in nursing care out there for a while now, and this summer a run of medical scares put both of them back in the hospital. Three weeks ago we moved my father-in-law into full-time care as well, and this weekend he fell and broke his hip. Ogallala has been home base on those trips, and every morning my walk takes me past Boot Hill.

It is a small, simple graveyard on a rise at the edge of town. Boot Hill was Ogallala's burial ground in the cattle-trail years, roughly 1870 to 1885, when more than a million head of Texas longhorns came up the trail to the railhead here. The state historical marker at the gate says most were buried with their boots on, their bodies placed in canvas sacks, lowered into shallow graves and marked with a wooden headboard. When the new cemetery opened west of town, families came back for their own. The marker puts what happened next plainly: only the unknown or the unclaimed remain in this western cemetery.

The boards I keep coming back to are the ones that say the least. One says only "Unknown." A few steps on, another gives a date, February 27, 1880, and nothing else. And near them a boy who at least got a name. William Brewton. Age 19. July 1879. Shot. Nineteen years of a life, and the board had room for only how it ended.

Six weeks of hospital hallways and nursing homes will make a person think about what a life leaves behind. Those boards asked the question out loud. Not how we die. Whether anyone can tell who we were, or what we stood for. And whether this week, an ordinary week, would leave any evidence.

Six minutes that moved the next choice

In 2015, Lisa Zaval, Ezra Markowitz and Elke Weber published a study in Psychological Science with a title that could have been written on that hill: "How will I be remembered?"

Three hundred twelve people took part online. Half of them began by writing a short essay about what they would want future generations to remember them for. The instructions nudged them toward the concrete, for example to think about skills or knowledge they would teach others. The essays took about six and a half minutes. The other half skipped the essay. Then everyone was told they had been entered in a lottery for a ten-dollar bonus, and everyone was given the same choice: keep the whole bonus, or give some of it to Trees for the Future, an environmental nonprofit.

The people who had written about their legacy gave more. They donated $3.34 on average, against $2.31 for the group that had not written. Seventy percent of the essay group gave something, against 61 percent of the others. The essay group also reported stronger beliefs about climate change and stronger intentions to act. The effects were small to medium, in the range statisticians call d = 0.23 to 0.36, and the authors say so.

What makes the result worth attention is not the size but the mechanism. The essay gave nobody new facts about the environment. It raised, for about ten minutes, how much people cared about the mark they would leave, and that was enough to move a choice with money in it.

The honest limits

This was one study, in one domain, with an online sample, and the bonus was a lottery entry rather than cash in every hand. It does not show that a legacy essay makes anyone generous in every direction. The authors list the duration of the effect as an open question, and their follow-up experiments suggest the prompt works mainly where people feel they have some control over the outcome. That last point is the whole argument for a plan.

Why a few sentences can do that

Researchers have a name for the pull the essay activated. In 2010, Matthew Fox, Leigh Tost and Kimberly Wade-Benzoni, writing in Business Ethics Quarterly, called it the legacy motive: the desire to build something that outlasts you. Their paper is a theory and a review, not a new experiment, and they present it that way. Its useful claim is that legacy links the search for meaning in a life to acting for other people.

A generation earlier, Dan McAdams and Ed de St. Aubin described the machinery underneath it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They called it generativity and described it as seven related features, among them a felt concern for the people who come after you, a commitment to do something about it, and generative action. The order matters. Concern without commitment stays a feeling. Commitment is what turns the feeling into something you do. Zaval and her colleagues borrowed McAdams's scale to measure the pull in their own participants.

The essay in the 2015 study did not create a value in anyone. It made a value they already held count in the next decision. That is the useful part for an ordinary week, because it means you do not need a graveside mood to use it. You need an existing concern to meet a commitment small enough to keep.

Life Pursuit One and Life Pursuit Two

Best Year Yet named the sharper version of that shift a long time ago. In December 2009, Jinny Ditzler wrote a post called Life Beyond Trying to Be Good Enough. It opens with four words: stop picking on yourself. Then she asks how long you have been trying to be good enough, and guesses since you were about ten years old. The problem, she wrote, is the assumption underneath it, that there is something wrong with you that has to be fixed before you are allowed to start. So she asks the question straight, are you ever going to be good enough, and answers it: yes, you already are.

She called the chase Life Pursuit I: trying to be good enough, a complete waste of your time, and a comfort zone you have to leave to become the person you are meant to be. Life Pursuit II is finding ways to use the gifts you already have to make a difference for your family, your friends, your community, your workplace and beyond. Her instruction for getting there was four words: take responsibility for your greatness. And she left you the question to ask of any week: how are you investing your intelligence and your life force? She closed the post with a line from Marianne Williamson, that it is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.

The two are easy to confuse because both fill a calendar. Life Pursuit I looks like improvement. It is the week spent proving you belong in the room and polishing the work instead of finishing it. Life Pursuit II is smaller and more exposed. It spends the week on someone else.

In April 2010, Tim Ditzler asked what we are waiting for. Most of us are waiting, he wrote, and do not realize it, because we are so busy. Once I get this done, then I will really get started. More doing, he said, is not the solution. It is the problem. The moment of change is right now: decide what is important, focus on it, and let the rest fall away.

Diana Baysinger put a simpler test under the whole decision. In a 2011 post on accountability she noticed the words "count" and "ability" inside the word itself. The question, she wrote, is just this: am I making my life count?

The week that becomes the life

Here is what most people miss. They treat that question as a late chapter. After the career, after the kids, after January. I understand why. I have spent this summer watching three people I love reach the chapter where the counting is mostly done, and it makes you want to get back in the car and go live. But Life Pursuit I does not announce itself. It looks like a full calendar. It looks like being useful, being careful, being almost ready. One ordinary week of that, then another, and you are busy enough to miss that you are waiting. When you look up, the week has become the life.

Ignition is not the engine

There is an honest catch. A sentence about how you want to be remembered is ignition, not the engine. The Zaval study measured the choice a few minutes after the essay, and the authors themselves flag how long the effect lasts as unknown. Clarity like that fades by Thursday if you do not attach a plan to it. You can feel the pull on a hill in western Nebraska at eight in the morning and still spend the next six days in Life Pursuit I. I know, because I have.

The plan is what keeps the concern from dissolving back into a mood. You do not need a graveside, a milestone or a new year. You need one value, one person and one action small enough to finish before the week is over.

This week, not January

• Name one value you would still want named if a board had to name you. Write it down.
• Name one person that value is for. Someone who would feel the difference if you used it.
• Take one action in the next seven days that person could point to. A conversation you have been postponing. A skill you have been meaning to pass on. A piece of work you have been polishing instead of finishing.

Three lines on a page. Then do the third one before Sunday. That is the whole practice, and it is deliberately smaller than a life plan, because the research says the pull is real and brief, and the archive says the moment of change is now.

Why the plan starts where it does

This is why the Best Year Yet plan opens the way it does. Before you write a single goal, you write down your values, and you write down the roles you play for the people in your life. Then the goals come, and they answer to both. Jinny built it that way on purpose. A goal that is not attached to a value and a person is just Life Pursuit I with a deadline.

So stop waiting. Leave Life Pursuit I, and write this week as Life Pursuit II. Your best year yet is not something you wait for January to grant you. It is something you plan. Including the part of the plan that would still be true if the board had to name you.

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