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You Want to Leave a Mark on This World but Don’t Know How?

Jeff Valdivia
5 min readFeb 6, 2022

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It’s not as hard as you think.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

Legacy — it’s a concept we all wrestle with.

What are we doing here? What’s our purpose? What will we leave behind when we’re gone? And what will people say about us?

We all want our lives to have meaning. We all want to have spent the little time we have on this Earth doing something that mattered. We all want to be remembered.

There are some fairly standard approaches to this problem:

  1. We have families, which are our biological legacy.
  2. We pursue careers that serve others.
  3. We seek fame and fortune, hoping to be immortalized.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these approaches, per se. I mean, they can all give us the sense that the actions we’ve taken in our lives mattered, right?

The problem, I think, lies in the perspective we take as we try to create a meaningful life. We too often convince ourselves that our lives are incomplete until we’ve accomplished this, that, or the other thing. So, we delay any possibility of living in a state of happiness, contentment, or satisfaction now.

We seem to be living our lives so that, when we look back on them, we can say we checked these…

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Jeff Valdivia
Jeff Valdivia

Written by Jeff Valdivia

Following my curiosity and hoping it will lead me to wisdom. I write about psychology, meditation, self-development, and spirituality.

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