DTH-XII-0026
“I keep wondering what my kids will actually have of me.”
Your children will not inherit your bank balance as their memory of you — they will inherit how you treated their mother, whether you came home present, what you did when it was hard. The legacy isn't built at the funeral. It's built at the dinner table tonight, in what you model when you think it doesn't count.
Your Practice
- Name the one trait you most want your kids to carry from you. Be honest about whether they're seeing it.
- Find the daily moment you've been phoning in — pickup, bedtime, dinner — and be fully there for it today.
- Tell them, in plain words, something true you believe about how to live. They remember what you say out loud.
- Stop saving the best of yourself for work and strangers. The people you're building for are in the next room.
The Architects
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life