Reputation walks into the room before you do. Legacy stays in the room after you leave.
STILLNESS
WHAT THIS MEANS
Reputation is what people expect from you, built from secondhand stories and last year’s version of you. Legacy is what stays true in a place after you are no longer in it: how a group treats new people, the standard on a team, the joke that outlived the friendship. One is about being seen, the other about what you left running.
Ask what remains behind when you graduate or quit or move. Then do one thing that improves it and has no name attached, like fixing the small broken system nobody else wanted to touch.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What stays in the room after you walk out of it?
MORE IN TIME, MORTALITY & LEGACY
- A scrapbook takes hours nobody sees. Forty years later it’s the most valuable thing in the house.
- Game servers shut down and a thousand hours of progress vanishes. Put some of your hours into things no company can…
- There’s a version of you living in other people’s memories. You don’t control it, but you feed it every day.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.