The Legacy Way: Walking Into Purpose

By Adam G. Fleming and Peter1 Jansen

Leadership and Executive coaches Adam G. Fleming and Peter Jansen discuss a variety of aspects to think about how to build a legacy, using your energy to build something to outlast your own lifetime. While defining the aspects each person needs to think about, Fleming and Ja

• Language: English
• Publisher: Friendly Hedgehog Books
• Release date: Mar 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781958622131

Book preview

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Copyright © 2024 by Adam G. Fleming and Peter Jansen

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-958622-12-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-958622-13-1

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-958622-14-8

The Legacy Way: A Camino Training Journal (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-958622-15-5

Published by Friendly Hedgehog Books, Goshen, Indiana, USA.

Contact the authors at [e-mail]

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

1.The LEGACY Goal

2.My Grandfather’s Hands: Peter’s Legacy

3.The LEGACY Way

4.What to Expect on a Camino

5.Interview: Jason Potsander

6.Interview: Susie Young-Tatum

7.Interview: Adam G. Fleming and Peter Jansen

8.Interview: Glebs Vrevskis

9.Interview: Adam G. Fleming and Peter Jansen

10.Impact

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author - Adam G. Fleming

About the Author - Peter Jansen

Also By Adam G. Fleming

Also by Peter Jansen

For Jason Potsander, who would have much preferred to be anonymous rather than become a hero. And for Heather Potsander. You have both tackled cancer with guts and grace.

- Adam

For my grandfather José Antonio Alonso Muñoz whose example I will always treasure and whose legacy lives beating strong in my heart.

- Peter

Introduction

Most of this book is in Adam’s voice, except where otherwise noted. 

I’m grateful to have met Peter Jansen in 2023 through a class we took together from the good folks at AQai.io. We were both interested in the research on adaptability and assessment tools, and saw great potential in the Adaptability Quotient assessment as one such tool to help leaders and their teams develop the muscles of adaptability, achieve proactive excellence, and gain new relevance in the marketplace. 

But that was only the beginning. In a breakout group during class, I expressed interest in leading a coaching group on El Camino de Santiago (in English, The Way of St. James) and suddenly we had a second thing in common: Peter had undertaken four Caminos, including a hike from Paris to the final destination of the Way, the St. James Cathedral, in Santiago de Compostela. I had done two of them from Porto, Portugal. Peter currently lives in Portugal, and said he was interested in the idea and asked me if we could talk about that idea further. Soon we agreed it was a project worthy of our focused collaboration in 2024.

After we had met half a dozen times to discuss themes for leading others on the Way, we found some basic agreement about what the Camino itself teaches. For example, each person on the Way learns some principles viscerally, like, take with you only what is enough; and each person engages a deep practice in living in the present moment. We also discovered a deeper theme: the Legacy theme. Peter already had the word Legacy in his coaching firm’s tagline: From Leadership to Legacy. In fact, the first thing you’ll see on Leadermakers.org’s website is this quote: 

Amateurs focus on building followers. Leaders focus on building legacies. 

– Peter Jansen

Meanwhile, while working in Egypt in 2019, I designed the LEGACY goal idea (which we’ll discuss straightaway in Chapter 1) and taught it to coaching students around the world to use in helping their clients develop a LEGACY mindset. 

What exactly is a LEGACY mindset? It is as simple as building something with the intention that it will outlive you. It is in stark contrast with the gun-for-hire executive who is racing toward his or her next quarterly bonus, trashing the long-term potential in favor of immediate gains. It requires ownership—but it is not only about business. Your legacy may be expressed in passing on your core values to your family or to people you mentor, in nonprofit efforts or passion projects, in writing novels, or making art as a side project (if you’re like me, the side project is the main project).

The serendipity of our connection is so obvious to me that I can only say it was no chance occurrence. We were in the same class, but might not have been sent into the same breakout room—but yet, there we were. I had the guts to open my big mouth about a crazy dream, a dream I knew would require some partnership, with no idea that this dream might connect with someone in that breakout room on that particular day. Still, we might have let the idea of coaching a legacy-mindset-oriented group on Camino go, as a class exercise, but by that time, it was in our hands to do something with it—and we are not passive individuals. When something becomes this obvious, Peter and I both take hold of opportunities, seize the day, and take action. So here we are. 

Now, we welcome you into that same serendipity. As we met and quickly became friends, this book has somehow found its way into your hands or to your ears. I don’t believe that is an accident. Now we invite you also on this journey, The Legacy Way, and through these pages, we extend our friendship to you. If what we express goes beyond your eyes or ears and resonates in your heart, do as we did: take action, and come along with us.

Note to the reader: We recommend that as you read through the book, you work through the companion volume, The Legacy Way Journal. We designed it so that you can take it with you on your own Camino journey and sketch out and codify the elements of your own Legacy Way.

Chapter 1

The LEGACY Goal

What is a Legacy?

Peter: Here’s a simple definition—it’s the work that you begin today or are doing now that will be continued by others after your lifetime.

We could say that living a certain set of values with integrity in such a way as to pass those values on to others to carry forward is a form of work, so even if you are not an entrepreneur or business owner, everyone can begin to think within a legacy framework around everything that they do. As we discuss the Legacy Goal you’ll discover more about what it truly means to lead and build a legacy, and by the end of the chapter, you should be ready to draft a Legacy Goal for yourself.

The Legacy Goal is a simple acronym to remember the seven components of building a legacy. We’ll discuss each of these briefly in this chapter. The components are as follows:

L: Lifetime and Beyond

E: Excellence

G: Generativity

A: Audience

C: Core-Values Driven

Y: Yield (crop/profit)

Y²: Yield (passing the baton)

LIFETIME and BEYOND:

There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. - Abraham Lincoln

I couldn’t care less about my legacy. As a manager of a football club you are there to do the job . . .. Tonight is a night I will never forget. It’s just nice to partner with these boys in this moment. - Jurgen Klopp, Liverpool manager after winning the Carabao Cup in 2024 with teenaged players on his squad ¹

As we said in the introduction, the idea of building a legacy is something that outlives you. I once asked a coaching client who was 71 years old what his vision was for his organization in 40 years. This simple question initially got a chuckle and launched us into an inquiry that lasted throughout a year of our coaching sessions. To spark similar inquiries with those under 40, I use the same vision question, but I insert "400 years" instead of 40.

This idea is not about name recognition. Whether anyone knows who you were 400 years from now completely misses the point. In fact, a legacy goal is a community effort, and no matter how rich or poor, powerful or weak you may be, you are just another building block in a wall stretching through time. We know the name of Wilbur Wilberforce as a famous abolitionist in England—but hundreds of other nameless abolitionists worked alongside Wilberforce, and he probably didn’t get the values that guided him in the direction of abolitionism out of thin air. He probably had a mentor or teacher whose name may be in one of his writings somewhere, but we don’t have it on the tip of our tongues. For legacies to have their impact on the world and in society, a breakthrough must be made. The problem is, we can’t guarantee that it will be made in your own generation. Fame is a byproduct. It isn’t the goal. In fact, for you to carry a legacy to the end of your own time on this planet, you’ll need to forget about your own name and surrender your ego. If your primary concern is that your name will be known in 400 years, you may miss the point of serving a legacy.

In fact, because this LEGACY goal concept is only four years old, and I’ll never have 400 years to try it out, I can’t even guarantee that it will work for you! That being said, we do believe the components listed here are the components that we can observe, by looking back at history, which are required of every legacy. None of us can guarantee that the legacies we carry will come to fruition. Our children or those we mentor will have to make choices to carry it. That’s the risk and the joy of a legacy.

Here are a few examples of legacy projects, things that were built to last:

The First Republic: The sovereign nation of San Marino (23.6 square miles nestled between the Italian regions of Emilia-Romagna and Marche) was founded in 301 A.D. as a republic and remains the oldest republic in existence.

The Megalithic Temples on Malta: On six sites in the Maltese Islands, you can visit temples which were constructed even before Egyptians were building pyramids. These temples have stood the test of time. Whoever built them did so in a way that has lasted perhaps as long as 7,000 years.

St. Peter’s Stiftskulinarium (from stift, diocese, skuller, cellar, or ‘diocese’s cellar’): This restaurant, often simply called Peter, claims to be the oldest restaurant in the world and has been in operation since at least 803 A.D. Located in Salzburg, Germany, it began as the wine cellar for St. Peter’s Abbey and occupies the space that was once the Abbey’s inner courtyard. ²

Questions to Ponder:

What do you consider worth working on even if you’re never recognized?

What legacies do you carry with you now that came from previous generations?

EXCELLENCE:

Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is. - Robert M. Pirsig

We’ll talk about other core values later, but as I thought through what it takes to build a legacy, it seemed to me that no legacy has ever been built without a core value for excellence. Excellent character and discipline, excellent craftsmanship and attention to detail, excellent execution. Things that are not founded on excellence do not usually last. Think about the brands that you love the most: brands that have been around longer than forty years, still going strong. What sets them apart? A legacy of excellence.

Why is Tricker’s the oldest shoemaker in England (Est. 1829)? Quality materials, quality craftsmanship. Our values haven’t really changed. Our intention is to make the very best and highest quality footwear that you can buy. Tricker’s boasts a quote from H.M. King Charles on their website. ³

Why has Bassett’s Ice Cream (est. 1861) in Philadelphia outlasted all the competition? According to their website, it’s High-quality ice cream with a luxuriously silky mouthfeel. Bassett’s is a family-owned business; company president Michael Strange is the great-great grandson of the founder, Lewis Dubois Bassett. Michael served ice cream to President