Lasting Impressions

In my financial advisor work I talk with people about legacy quite a bit.  This is usually in the context of financial legacy but sometimes it will pull towards emotional, family, and community legacy. There is much a person should and shouldn’t do with their estate when they leave this earth, but there are more things a person can and should do while living to leave a lasting legacy. And I’m not just talking about money or the spiritual, educational, and social values people instill in their children.

Recently I read a blog by the co-founder and current President and CEO of Saint Louis Bread Company (known to people outside of St Louis as Panera Bread), Ron Shaich. Ron was saying that over the Christmas holiday he had spent time caring for a very ill, elderly uncle. Ron was his closest living relative as all of the older generation people had already passed away. The point of the blog was that it is not what we have at the end of our life, but it is the relationships we have had, and some of the good things we have done for other people during our lifetime, that really count. His uncle might have had a great deal of money to leave to various charities and it would have been appreciated. But that was money, it wasn’t the essence of his uncle.

If you know about Panera, you will know their goal is to serve quality food and they have recently starting adding stores, Panera Cares, that allow patrons to pay what they can afford to pay. We have two in St Louis now and they are working out quite well. Some people pay extra for their meals and others pay little or nothing. Ron wanted to establish a model for the ‘Cares’ cafes that would be sustainable financially, and provide a good environment, free of judgment, for people to get a good, healthy meal, even if they didn’t have funds to pay for that meal. I consider Ron to be a big hearted man with an exceptionally good business sense. He also has a very strong sense of family and social responsibility from the corporate view.

Several years ago I read a little book called, “The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch (Hypernion, NY, NY, 2008). Randy was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon and was asked to give a final class lecture, a special talk given at the end of a school term. Just a short time before he was asked to give the lecture, he had been diagnosed with liver cancer and knew he had only a limited time to live. He agreed to give the lecture and he did not give it about dying. Rather, he gave the lecture about the importance of living ones dreams, overcoming obstacles, and helping to enable some else to live their dreams.

Perhaps if we lived as if we had a limited amount of time, we would live better and help others live better. We might seek more diligently, and with more urgency, to live our own dreams and enable others to live theirs. We might be able to create a living legacy, not just with our children or those we personally know, but to total strangers our efforts might reach.

And maybe, just maybe, we would be able to leave a good lasting impression.