Maybe it's from working around healthcare professionals and being exposed to some tough individuel stories or maybe it's from reading the last lecture not too long ago, I had this thing dawn on me:
Even though we are essentially healthy people, fueled by Soylent, long distance running, yoga, meditation and mindfulness - as a biological based organisms we are not long for this world.
And I don't mean it the morbid way, more like in a reality conscious, fact-of-life kind of way. I think Tim Urban framed it pretty well on his blog Wait but why (paraphrasing here): On the very basic level we are biological containers meant to carry encoded genome information and pass it on to other containers.
So that whole bundle of bio-truth led me to think about impact. Being very time and timing aware the question to me isn't "what legacy I am going to leave behind" because (a) that is pretty morbid and I'm not about that and (b) legacy is very subjective and it sounds like a thing other people would retrospect on rather a thing that I can influence. The question I'm asking myself is "am I making an impact today".
Trying to break down what "Impact" means, I identify three levels of impact -
- Myself
- People that are close to me
- Impact at scale
Creating positive impact on myself is something that I'm constantly working towards and is reflected in my personal mission statement: Being mindful, empathetic and aware is constatant work and slowly becoming a framework for personal growth. It's an everyday at a time kind of business and the impact is well felt.
From there it's all about taking those core principals and put them to scale: How can I model my personal mission statement and project those values to my family, team and people around me and one level higher, how do I make sure that workplace project I'm involved at positively impact a large amount of 3rd circle people.
I'm going to focus on stuff that matters, is what I'm trying to say.