Ideas last longer than your name

In moments of complete distress, we get an opportunity to rethink what’s most important in life. Our careers, the things that we buy, and the content we share online are all meaningless if it doesn’t serve a bigger purpose. Every day we get a chance to be alive is a chance for us to contribute to the global and local cultures we live in.

Life is a shared experience with the people who live with you now, those two have lived before you, and the future generations that your actions will affect.

If you’re lucky, your great-grandchildren will know of you—even if they don’t know your full name after the age of 30. Yet, six to seven generations down the road what will remain is the values and ideas that you helped cement into the consciousness of your family. This also goes for your community and your country.

No matter how much content you produce and how viral it becomes, there are so many posts that you can possibly make that will be remembered. There is an extremely small chance that anything you post today will be remembered 100 years from now.

Taking credit for your ideas is crucial for being rewarded and recognized but, what is more important is ensuring that the good ideas stick. It would be nice to be remembered for helping the world. Yet, being remembered and actually helping (contributing something of value) are two different things.

One goal is more important than the other.

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

— Amos Tversky

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