Mike Brown argues that making a real difference in people's lives right now matters more than chasing a legacy after you're gone. He calls the desire for buildings named after you or lasting fame an ego trip, and suggests genuine impact might create a legacy anyway, but that shouldn't be the point.
Impact is much more important than legacy. By definition, legacy is what happens after you're gone. It is such an egocentric idea to worry about having my name on the side of a building at a university after I go, because those students walking by every day certainly aren't thinking about, wow, who's Mike Brown? What did he do? And even if they were thinking about that, I'm not sure that that matters to me right now. What I'm focused on rather than legacy is making an impact while I'm here and affecting those people around me and making their lives better. And if you do impact right, then naturally there's something that maybe lives beyond you. But that's not incredibly important to me.
