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I’m incredibly affected by the belief system that the more you think about leaving a legacy, the more likely your behavior will be good. You know, I think if you care about your reputation in the long term, if you care about leaving a mark, if you care about being 80 or 90 years old and sitting on the porch drinking lemonade, when you see things that are going on in the world knowing you contributed to them, you know, you’re going to care more about legacy. Thinking about legacy is incredibly powerful because it’s wildly lucrative, both financially, but more importantly, spiritually and emotionally, you know. It’s just more fun if you’ve done bigger things or better things, or gone about them in a better way.
Scale your passions
When I think about what I’m doing with VeeFriends and VeeCon and the whole Vee world, they’re very big parts of the way I think about my legacy, and I use them as vehicles to try to put the things that I want to put into the world. VeeFriends is an intellectual property of 280-plus characters that is grounded in collectability, competition, and storytelling that is a universe that I created to create characters in pop culture that are pushing attributes that I think are incredibly important. And VeeCon is the super conference that is trying to bring more humanity to business and touches on subject matters that I think historically we’ve not talked about in business. Like kindness, like nice guys finish first, even though the world tries to tell you otherwise. When I think about what I’m doing with VeeFriends and VeeCon, I’m really scaling my passions, and my brand and the things that I want to be talking about.
When you think about scaling, you have to find your form factor. Conferences felt comfortable to me ’cause I’ve done a thousand of them as a keynote speaker. I’ve seen the inner workings and I felt I had the capacity and capability to throw a big conference. VeeFriends intellectual property, felt very comfortable to me building around animation and collectibles and pop culture because that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 40 years. I’ve been collecting the Pokemons and the trading cards and the comic books my whole life, and I understood the collectibles market. You have to think about what you’re able to do. This becomes a self-aware game. I can sit here and tell you how I did it. I’m just aware that only 13% of you are similar enough to me where that’s good advice. Some of you need to scale it in podcast form. Sometimes you have to scale it in product form. Sometimes you have to scale it in educational material form, in service business, in SaaS business, software. There’s many different ways to scale, but you have to find the way that you’re capable of scaling.
Go for it
You know, look, not everyone has to have the same ambitions. So even though I’m thinking about multi-generational impact, I’m aware that not everyone’s going to have that North star, but I would challenge everybody who’s watching to understand that with the internet, with the emerging blockchain, with the way the world’s working, going for it, going bigger, and trying to make something multi-generational is fun. I think family businesses, especially ones that think “I’m passing the business on” to their kids and grandkids think in these terms. I think Fortune 500 companies, especially CMOs and CEOs, think in these terms because they’re the driver currently of something iconic. But I think most people in the middle don’t think about that. And I would argue if you’re one of those people to start considering that, ’cause your behaviors on how you build your brand, how you build your team, when you start thinking a hundred-year terms versus a hundred-day terms, you’re playing a totally different game.
Being kind of simplistic about this, I find that people that go for it actually find their way to bigger economics than people that don’t. When you think long, you tend to, actually, ironically make more money than if you think short only about the money. Because you’re building a stronger foundation like this chair. Like, if you’re trying to build a great chair, there’s a good chance that these four legs are going to be stronger than if you’re thinking about a chair you’re going to sit on for one day. And so thinking in those terms are important to actually maximize why you’re even watching this video. Like, why are you watching this video? You’re watching this video ’cause you’re hopefully trying to extract something of value so you can make something for yourself happen. Please think long in legacy and multi-generational. There’s a much better chance you’ll get the outcome you’re looking for tomorrow by thinking about five, 10, 15 years from tomorrow.