Here’s a blog-ready version that echoes the episode without mirroring it — a fresh angle on time, attention, and the importance of tending to what’s right in front of us. It nods to legacy but grounds the piece firmly in “the now,” keeping your tone reflective, personal, and spacious.
I just wrapped the final PM Talks episode of the year with my good friend Patrick Rhone, and while we explored legacy on the show, what stayed with me afterward wasn’t the idea of what we leave behind — it was how easily we overlook what we’re living through.
Legacy is retrospective. It’s shaped by interpretation, distance, and the stories people assemble when we’re no longer in the room to clarify the details. But the things that actually become our legacy? Those are built through quieter forces: attention, presence, simple consistency. And those only exist in one place — the now.
The older I get, the more I feel time behaving strangely. The years accelerate, the milestones blur, and then — oddly — the smaller slices of the day feel slower when I meet them head-on. A moment of stillness stretches. A conversation lands. A small task hums with meaning I wouldn’t have noticed twenty years ago.
That paradox is worth paying attention to.
Where Meaning Actually Lives
Because if legacy is shaped by stories others will one day tell, the “now” is the story we get to inhabit. It’s the only place where we have any real agency. We can’t dictate how we’ll be remembered, but we can shape how we show up — moment by moment — right here.
And that’s the part I think we don’t talk about enough. Not the arc of a life, but the individual brushstrokes. Not the final chapter, but the paragraph we’re writing today. Washing the dishes. Answering the hard question. Noticing that our kid has one foot in childhood and the other stretching toward adulthood. Watching the curtain close after their performance and letting ourselves stay in that liminal space before applause returns us to motion.
These are the moments that actually shape the future stories. And yet we speed past them as if there’s something bigger on the other side.
There is — but it isn’t out there. It’s here.
When we nurture the now — when we slow down enough to see it, name it, and inhabit it — we honor the one place in time that’s fully ours. The rest belongs to interpretation. The rest is memory, revision, and narrative.
The now is the only part that’s alive.
So yes, we talk about legacy on the podcast. But if you want the real path toward shaping it, start with something far simpler: be present in the moment you’re currently living. Give it your full attention. Let it leave a mark on you before you worry about the mark you’ll leave on the world.
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