What a Musical Can Tell Us About Legacy #33 #cong24 #legacy

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1. You can’t define how other people will see your legacy
2. Even if you make huge sacrifices for your legacy, other people may not recognise what you have done.
3. Depending on what you want, (2) may not matter.

A climate and software professional who has been living in Connemara for the last 10 years.

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By Iain Morrow

My 14 year old son is obsessed with the musical Hamilton. So finally, we went to see it a few weeks ago. And it’s a fantastic show!

If you haven’t seen it, you might be wondering why it’s relevant. Well, Hamilton is all about legacy. It’s about one man’s burning desire to secure his legacy through his political work and his writings. A man who was very conscious that he didn’t have long to make his mark, and who wrote “like he’s running out of time”. A man who subordinated his personal life to the pursuit of what he thought would be his legacy: as one of the Founding Fathers of America. And these weren’t just a few late nights when he could have spent time with his wife and children. You could reasonably argue that he sacrificed his family itself in pursuit of his political and intellectual legacy. His wife points out that family is legacy, but that doesn’t matter to him, until it is lost.

Stories about politically ambitious men are not unusual. For me, though, the most important point in Hamilton is that he failed. Before the musical, few people knew his name or what he did. He wasn’t a household name like Jefferson or Washington.

Now the failure is not through lack of effort. It’s because “you don’t get to decide who tells your story”, as the musical says. In other words, how the world sees your legacy won’t be decided by you since by definition, you won’t be around.

The person or people who do “tell your story” might not be much like you either. In this case, the musical was written by a man born in 1980, 225 years after Alexander Hamilton himself. Those years have been – to say the least – eventful. How faithfully do you think someone born in the year 2200 might interpret your own legacy? How much will they really understand you? They might focus on things you did that you don’t see as core to your legacy. Hamilton’s wife, for example, outlived him by half a century and spent time promoting an orphanage that they founded. That’s not a bad thing to be remembered for, but it has little to do with the political arena where Hamilton spent his time and energy.

At this point, you might be thinking this is all a bit depressing. Even with huge effort and sacrifice, you can’t guarantee the legacy you want.

It made me wonder whether, if he had known this, Alexander Hamilton would have done anything differently. He might have decided that he’d spend more time with his family, or let someone else write all those essays about the US Constitution.

The answer to this question goes to two important points about the desire for legacy. The first is your own drive and personality – you might be a workaholic who uses ‘legacy’ as an excuse to spend more time at your desk.

But the more important point is about the difference between your impact on the world after you are gone, and how people perceive that. In Hamilton’s case, as one of the framers of the US Constitution amongst other things, his impact was immense. It just wasn’t recognized as arguably it should have been. That might be a problem if your view of legacy is how you are remembered. But if your view of legacy is that the most important thing is the lasting change you make, maybe Hamilton didn’t fail after all.