Money. Freedom. Legacy.
What’s your life’s work going to be? What will you leave behind for the next generation? How will you be remembered? What will be your legacy?
I changed jobs three times in the first three years after graduation. To be honest, I was primarily driven by the money. Not that the money was much; it was just a tiny, little bit more than the last one. But it was enough to make me change employers. With frozen-out financial support from my parents (“Hey man, congratulations on graduating university! So happy you’re entering the workforce!”), every extra bit of money helped with my accommodation and personal upkeep. It wasn’t just me. Except for those that came from wealthy families and those that went straight to graduate school, a lot of my friends did pretty much the same thing, some of them swapping out as much as five employers in the first three years of our graduation.
It’s quite common for people to have their professional goals revolve around money. If you’re starting out in life, it’s important to have enough to take care of yourself, save and plan for the immediate future. Personal circumstances can also fuel that need to earn as much as possible in as little time as possible. Whatever the case, it will appear that most of us begin in what I believe is the first of the three phases of our professional pursuit, where almost all career decisions are based on how much we can make.
As we progress in our career or professional pursuits, we gain more knowledge and experience, we take up more senior positions, we become more confident in our abilities, we become more aware of the possibilities before us, and our goals evolve to the point where we desire the freedom to pursue self-actualization, to be the best we can ever become. In this second phase of our career, it becomes less of “I want to earn X dollars” and more of “I want to build this; I want to make a major contribution to this field of study; I want to be a recognized expert in something; I want to solve this huge problem in the society”, etc. To be clear, money will always be part of the equation. But it will no longer be the primary force driving our ambition and our career. In this phase, we tend to become a lot more focused on the impact we want our work to have on the world. We begin to seek out the freedom to focus our energies on the important tasks that will change the lives of real people.
Eventually, little by little, we will find ourselves thinking a lot more about what we want to leave behind, what we want to be remembered for long after we are gone. In this third stage, our goals will be more geared towards firmly establishing our life’s work.
I’ve always thought these three stages represent some kind of maturity curve for one’s professional pursuit. It is also a path personal fulfillment tends to follow. Lots of us get stuck at the first stage where all our professional goals are based on money alone. Unfortunately, we too easily forget to plan for and take steps towards the second and third stages. The good news is that we don’t have to be old to start thinking about our legacy. The vision might be hazy at first, but it will get clearer with time and effort. It’s perfectly OK to keep fine-tuning that picture.
If your professional goals are not progressing along this maturity curve, perhaps now is the time to ask yourself some important questions: what’s your life’s work going to be? What will you leave behind for the next generation? How will you be remembered? What will be your legacy?
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