“Well then, will a little fame distract you?  Look at the speed of universal oblivion, the gulf of immeasurable time both before and after, the vacuity of applause, the indiscriminate fickleness of your apparent supporters, the tiny room in which all this is confined.  The whole earth is a mere point in space[.]”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.3

Leaving a Legacy

This newsletter - a companion to our Lumida Legacy podcast - will examine what it means to live a life worthy of the term “legacy.”

While our podcast explores the strategies employed by HNW and UHNW individuals across a wide range of legacy related topics, from improving healthspan to creating a multi-jurisdictional estate plan, this newsletter will approach the concept of legacy from a more fundamental level.

We’ll step back to gain perspective. We will focus on the routines and habits that help a person lead a meaningful life.

The unifying theme of our podcast is how to live to 100 and how to plan for whether you reach centenarian status or not.  

Here, we’ll discuss how incredibly successful people organize their lives and implement routines across a variety of dimensions: nutrition, exercise, sleep, family, relationships, and work.

We’ll still share strategies related to estate planning, insurance, and healthspan; however, we’ll focus on more tactical advice.

What does Legacy mean?

The concept of legacy is highly personal.

One person may desire to work tirelessly to generate wealth to provide financial security for their children and generations to come.  

Another person who also desires to generate extraordinary wealth may be inclined to give away all of their accumulated wealth to various charitable organizations as a means of securing what they deem to be a meaningful legacy.  

Still others may give their time during their lifetime to a cause or set of causes that are meaningful to them and redirect the sacrifice and dedication necessary to generate wealth towards different ends.

Each person, if they have followed their internal passions with dedication and focus, will have lived a meaningful life, which in and of itself means they have left a legacy - a life well lived.  

Which is why this newsletter will endeavor to understand what routines and habits help an individual achieve and accomplish their goals, whatever those goals may be.

Routines —> Habits —> Outcomes

We’ve chosen to focus on routines because it is through routines that a person or family or enterprise (any group for that matter) develops the habits necessary to create meaningful outcomes. 

This concept of focusing on routines and habits stretches back to antiquity.

Until recently, I had only thought of routines and habits as they relate to health: workout routines, eating habits, sleep schedules, etc.

Worse, I believed that routines were for the weak and motivation was unnecessary; all one needed was discipline.

Or at least that’s what I told myself…

For the most part, it worked. Sure, I experienced ups and downs in, but I chalked those up to the vicissitudes of life. I was traveling too much for work. The holidays were coming up. I was on vacation.

Because I did not have established routines nor thought of routines as the scaffolding for habits, I did not operate consistently enough to overcome external forces. I was not imposing my will on the world. I was allowing forces outside of my control to impact my behavior, which led to inconsistent outcomes.

My mindset began to change over the last few years as I studied how others achieved success. I learned why established routines enable you to rely less on willpower, discipline, and motivation.

I also started to notice routines or the lack of routines everywhere I looked.

This is a classic example of frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. This cognitive bias refers to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time, leading to the belief that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.

Suppose you decide to buy a particular model car that you believe not everyone drives. In the next few days, you’ll likely see that car wherever you go. It feels like suddenly, everyone is driving that car.

Boom — frequency illusion. The car is not appearing more frequently; rather, our awareness of the car has increased.

Once I began to see and explore the power of routines, I decided to take an inside out approach, focusing first on myself, second on my family, third on my business.

To be clear, I’m still on the path of learning and am using this newsletter as a forcing function to level up my approach to life.

To that end, as I explore an area, I will share my learnings in this newsletter. I plan to explore all facets of life.

Next week I plan to write about sleep routines, since sleep is so fundamental to performing well in all dimensions of life.

In future weeks, I plan to explore the topics listed below. Importantly, I’d love to hear from you. So please reach out — @jguilder or [email protected] — and let me know what routines work for you, what habits you’re trying to create, and what outcomes you’d like to achieve.

By exploring these routines, finding what works best, and implementing new routines, we’ll create new habits. Those habits will create outcomes, good or bad. And those outcomes will build over time to determine how well we show up in life.

All of which will culminate in how we live our life and, ultimately, create our legacy.

Justin