Legacy is Greater than Currency

Legacy is greater than currency. - Gary Vaynerchuk

This is one of my favorite Gary Vaynerchuk quotes. The premise is simple: if you focus on the long term or the “big picture” as Gary likes to say and not settle on short-term gains, the currency will come.

Wath the video:

Shane Mac recently wrote an article on why he uses Foursquare or Gowalla to checkin at places. Shane writes:

In the end, life is all about the story we create of it but remembering the story just got much easier. Here’s to a better world, better communication and spending more time with the people who matter. The fact that every single thing I do will be a story about my entire life that hopefully my kids or grandkids can read in the future really makes me want to do better, and more everyday. I never met my Grandpa but I’d love to know if he drank at the same bars that I do. I’d love to just know what he thought, how he acted and if he was a spitting image of his grandson today.

Do you realize that every generation from now on will know exactly who we were, what we liked, where we went and who we were associated with? That’s why we should always ask ourselves;

What’s my legacy?

You are the only one who can write it nowadays. Not stories passed along. Not wise tales. Just truth. I think about that everyday.

After watching Gary’s video and reading Shane’s post, it could be thought that both points are only related by the word “legacy.”

Gary is encouraging us to focus on our personal brand and making decisions based upon the long-term. Despite that he says “… the currency will come” he is not encouraging us to focus on our legacy for the sake of currency. That’s just a side benefit. He is encouraging our focus on the long-term because customers will notice, friends will notice, and people will notice. He is encouraging it because it’s the right thing to do. This will all have a side-effect of improving our business. Our lives. Ourselves.

Shane is encouraging us to question our legacy. For the first time in human history, we are presented with technology that allows us to write [not in the literal sense] our history as Shane points out by using check-in software.

Both Shane and Gary indirectly and directly encourage us to use technology to build our legacy. We can use this technology to improve ourselves, our business, and our legacy.