Sage Solutions

Legacy and the Life You’re Building

• David Sage • Episode 58

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What would people actually say about you tomorrow? Not the polished bio or the curated grid—real stories, told in kitchens, over coffee, and in the soft silence after a hard day. We sit with grief, clarity, and the unsettling but liberating question of what truly outlasts us, then turn that insight into simple daily practices that anyone can start today.

We walk through a vivid “begin with the end in mind” exercise and pause where it matters: family, friends, colleagues, and community. From there, we unpack why the resume fades while character endures, and how the “tyranny of the urgent” drowns out the whispers that build a life—deep conversations, bedtime stories, quiet check-ins, and the slow work of listening. Drawing on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, we underscore a core truth of personal growth: good relationships keep us happier and healthier, and they are the living archive of our legacy.

This conversation blends personal story and practical tools. You’ll get a simple daily compass question to cut through noise, a weekly calendar audit to make space for presence, and specific micro-actions that compound—one whisper before every scream, one honest text before the inbox, one page with your kid before the scroll. We don’t chase perfection; we choose alignment, repair quickly, and return often. Legacy becomes a practice of attention, a pattern of kindness, and a feeling others carry forward long after we leave the room.

If this resonates, subscribe for more grounded conversations on self-worth, confidence, and intentional living. Share this with someone who needs a gentle nudge today, and leave a review to help others find the show. What whisper will you follow before the day ends?

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The Sage Solutions Podcast and content posted by David Sage is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. No coaching client relationship is formed by listening to this podcast. No Legal, Medical or Financial advice is being given. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast or website is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice, diagnosis, or treatment of a psychotherapist, physician, professional coach, Lawyer or other qualified professional. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. The opinions of guests are their own and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the podcast.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Sage Solutions Podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage, and I am a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions. I usually start this podcast with a bit more energy, ready to dive into a topic with a clear plan. But today is a little different. Last episode, I shared with a heavy heart that my stepfather John passed away. He was an important guest of this podcast as well. It's been just over two weeks now. And ever since I lost him, my world has just felt a lot more empty and just off. Grief is a strange but powerful teacher. It strips away everything that doesn't matter. And in the quiet moments, in the waves of sadness, it holds up a mirror and forces you to look at your life. So that's what I want to talk about today. Because for me, through a lens of loss, this topic has taken on a whole new meaning. What is the legacy that you are leaving? And not just as a theoretical exercise, but I want us to treat this as a real, tangible, and urgent question. What is the story of our life? And are we living it in a way that we'll be proud of? Before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action. Subscribe and share this podcast with them. Alright, let's take a step back. I want you to take a deep breath with me. Inhale and exhale. I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to sit with it for a moment. Because it's a heavy one. If today were your last day on earth, what would people say about you tomorrow? Not what do you hope they'd say? Not the polished version that you've curated on social media. But what would they actually say? What would your partner whisper to their best friend about the love you gave? What story would your children tell their own kids about who you were? What would your colleagues say, not in a formal eulogy, but over coffee about the kind of person you were in your day-to-day life? This, my friends, is the topic we're diving into today. The legacy that you are leaving, and more importantly, are you living your life right now in a way that creates it? There's a powerful exercise, often used in leadership and personal development, that I think is really relevant for this conversation. So I'm gonna walk you through it. It's called Beginning with the End in Mind. And it happens to be one of Stephen Covey's seven habits of highly effective people. So close your eyes for a second, if you can. Of course, if you're driving, keep them open. But just bring your mind inward. I want you to picture yourself a few years from now, walking into a service. It's a memorial. As you get closer, you see the faces of your family, your closest friends, people from your community, colleagues from your work. There are flowers everywhere. Soft music is playing. And then you see a picture at the front of the room, and it's you. This is your funeral. Now stay with me here. I'm not trying to be morbid. This is meant to be a clarifying exercise. Now four people are going to get up and speak. First, a member of your family. Maybe your partner, your child, a sibling. Second, one of your dearest friends. Third, a colleague from your professional life. And fourth, someone from your community, maybe a club, a charity, or a spiritual group that you were a part of. What would you want them to say? What character traits do you want them to remember? What contributions do you want them to highlight? Do you want them to talk about your kindness, your integrity, your generosity? How do you want them to remember you? Do you want it to be as someone who was always present, who listened deeply, who made them feel seen and heard? Or do you want them to talk about all of the hours that you logged at the office, the promotions you got, the car you drove? Okay, open your eyes. Are you living today in a way that would lead them to say those things? And if not, it might feel a little bit like a gut check. But when someone you love dies, you spend a lot of time telling stories about them. My family and I have been doing that, both before he passed and after. Whether we've been gathered in a living room, a hospice center, or on a phone call. Many of my conversations have been memories of John. And something has become incredibly profoundly clear to me. Nobody is talking about how many hours he worked. Nobody is mentioning the promotions he got. Nobody's telling stories about his resume. Even his coworkers primarily talked about his character, his reliability, and yes, his work ethic. But the stories that we're telling are about his character. We're talking about the way that he would drop anything to help someone, no questions asked. We've been laughing about his repetitive jokes and unique sayings or johnisms that he would say at literally every opportunity. I keep remembering how I was completely overwhelmed when my car wouldn't start after work in below zero temperatures. Stranded in Milwaukee with things stolen out of my car. I was lucky enough to have not one but two different people show up and help me, both my father and my stepfather. And whenever Hannah was struggling with the grief and loss of her father, John was the first one to be there. Because he understood what it felt like. That was his legacy. Not the stuff he accumulated. Not even his beloved Ford F-150. But the love that he circulated. It was in the small daily acts of kindness. It was in the feeling of safety, support, and protection that he gave us. It was the way that he made other people feel. And it has forced me to ask myself with a level of honesty that is frankly pretty uncomfortable. What stories will be told about me? If my life were to end tomorrow, what would be the recurring theme in the memories of in the memories that people share? Would it be about my presence or my preoccupation, my kindness or my critique? My love or my ambition? For so many of us, there's a huge gap between the person we want to be remembered as and the person that we actually are day in and day out. We all want to be remembered as loving and present. But if you spend dinner scrolling through emails on your phone, that's not exactly it. We want to be remembered as a supportive and caring friend. But if we're always too busy to pick up the phone and call or to ever hang out, that's gonna be pretty unlikely. We want to be remembered for our integrity, but maybe we cut a corner here and there to get ahead. It's this gap. This is where our legacy gets lost. It may be a slow fade, a daily drift away from our deepest values. We don't wake up one day and decide to live a life that's out of alignment. It happens in the small, seemingly insignificant choices we make every single hour. There's this quote by the philosopher William James that has been echoing in my head. The great use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast us. Our inbox will be deleted, your to-do list will be thrown away, the money in your bank account will be spent or transferred. Even the awards on your shelf will eventually collect dust in a box. But the kindness you show someone, the wisdom you impart to a child, the encouragement you give a friend who is struggling, that has a ripple effect. That is what outlasts you. That is the currency of true legacy. It's the love, the lessons, the laughter you create. The problem is what I call the tyranny of the urgent. We are drowning in things that feel urgent. But they are rarely important in the grand scheme of things. That email that just came in, the notification on your phone, that minor crisis at work, these things scream for our attention, and we give it to them. Meanwhile, the truly important things, the things that lead to a life well lived and a legacy that outlasts us. They don't scream, they whisper. Having a deep, uninterrupted conversation with your partner whispers. Reading a bedtime story to your child whispers. Calling your aging parents just to check in, whispers. Taking a walk in nature to clear your head, whispers. Working on that passion project that truly lights you up, whispers. It's easy to think of legacy as something for presidents and philanthropists, with big marble statues and buildings with their names on them. But the truth is a real legacy is much more intimate. It's woven into the hearts and minds of the people that we interact with every day. Your legacy is built in the moments that you choose to listen to the whispers instead of the screams. It's a daily practice of putting first things first. It's asking yourself over and over, is this the best use of my time, my energy, and my life right now? Is this action building the life and the legacy that I want? My stepfather didn't build skyscrapers or find a cure for a disease. But he did build a legacy of love, care, and reliability in the hearts of every single person he knew. And that will outlast him. It will ripple through us and through our children. That is a life well spent. Losing someone you love gives you what I can only describe as a brutal clarity. The grief, the loss, the pain cuts through the noise of everyday life. The petty annoyances, the emails that felt so urgent, social media drama, the worries about what other people think, it all just feels empty, it falls away. It becomes meaningless static. At least temporarily. And it's in that silence, I guess, the silence of the pain, that you can finally hear the whispers of what truly matters. The health of yourself and your loved ones. A moment of real connection, a shared laugh. Maybe even a sunset. This experience ended up leading me down a bit of a rabbit hole. And I found myself rereading a conclusion from a study. It was the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It's one of the longest studies ever done on human life. It was tracking people for over 80 years. They wanted to know what the secret to a happy, healthy, and long life was. And after decades of data, the answer was stunningly simple. It's good relationships. The study director, doctor Robert Waldinger, summed it up by saying the clearest message that we get from this eighty year study is this. Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Sitting here in the midst of this grief, I can tell you that I've never felt the truth of that statement more deeply. In the end, all you have is the love that you've given and the love that you've received. The quality of your connections is a huge part of the quality of your life. And it also happens to be the foundation of your legacy. The amount of people that visited John during his cancer journey illustrated more clearly to me than anything I've ever seen that he was a living embodiment of that study. Now, his life wasn't perfect, and he shared some of the mistakes or changes he would have made had he known that this would be the outcome when we had the episodes where I interviewed him. But he spent a lot of his time investing in relationships with people. He put those relationships first. And the return on that investment will be a room full of people overflowing with love and gratitude for the man that he was. What more could any of us hope for? The hard part is living that truth when you're not in this moment of crisis and pain. How do we hold on to this clarity when the urgent notifications and demands of daily life come screaming back? Now I don't have all the answers. I'm taking this a day at a time. But I can share what this experience is teaching me. The biggest lesson is this. Don't wait. Don't wait for a tragedy to tell people how you feel about them. Don't wait until you retire to spend time on what you love doing. Don't wait for a diagnosis to start prioritizing your well-being. The legacy that you want to leave has to be built today. It might be it might be built between 8 and 9 a.m. when you choose to make your kid breakfast instead of checking your email. It's built on your lunch break when you call your mom or significant other just to say hi. It's built at 7 p.m. when you put your phone away and listen, truly listen, to how your partner's day went. So here's the challenge for you and for me. First, let's stop thinking of our legacy as some grand future project. Instead, let's start asking a simple daily question. In any given moment, with any choice, we can ask ourselves, is this action building the legacy I want to leave? Is scrolling on Instagram for 20 minutes building it? Is gossiping about a coworker building it? Is staying late to finish a task that could wait until tomorrow building it? These questions weren't meant to inspire guilt. They're meant to be a compass, a gentle nudge back towards your own North Star. And second, let's look at our calendars for the next week with these new eyes. Not with the eyes of a productivity machine, but with the eyes of a mortal human being who's going to make mistakes and has a finite amount of precious time. Where in your schedule have you made time for the people who are truly important to you? Where is the space for connection, for joy, for presence? If it's not there, the good news is that you are the one who holds the key, the pen, and you can open the door. You can write it in. Maybe it means scheduling a non-negotiable family dinner. Maybe it means blocking out one evening for yourself to read or walk or just be still. Maybe it's putting a recurring 15-minute reminder in your calendar to call a friend. These are the small hinges that swing the big doors of a life. John's legacy wasn't built in one grand gesture. It was built over a lifetime of showing up, of telling jokes, and of just being there. Grief is a heavy, painful thing. And if you're going through it like I am, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to the episode that we did on grief, which featured my wife, Hannah, as she talked about the grief of losing her father, and how it was a heavy, painful thing, and that it takes time. But if we let grief have time, it can also be a gift. It's another expression of love. It can be an invitation to wake up, to live with more intention, more love, and less fear, to honor those that we've lost by living our own lives more fully. John's story has now been written, but his legacy, his kindness, his caring, his humor, his unwavering support that lives on in me and in everyone that he loved will live on. We started today with a heavy question. What will your story be? And the beautiful, empowering truth is that you are the author. Your legacy is not something that happens to you when you die. It is something that you are creating right now, with every choice you make, every word you speak, and every action that you take. Your story is still being written. Every single day you are the author. So I ask you, what is the story you want to tell? And I urge you to make it a story of love, of courage, of connection and integrity, a story that outlasts you. So start writing it today. And remember, you are enough. And you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence, and resilience. Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions podcast. Your time is valuable, and I'm so glad you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more Sage advice. One last thing. The Legal Language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended as a substitute for the personalized advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.