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Key points
- A legacy tree is like a family tree, but it displays the impact we make.
- A legacy tree is a form of immortaltiy.
- We spend a lot of time at work. A legacy tree makes visible the effect of our work.
More than 15 million individuals trace their family's roots using Ancestry.com, the world's largest digital family history resource. There is a deep satisfaction in spending hours poring over connections and seeing a family tree and the branches that stem from just one pair of individuals. Family trees are a great way to see where we fit in the world.
But what about the impact we make on the world? Is there a way to measure that? The answer is...
YES, with a Legacy Tree.
It wasn't until I sat down with Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Stockholm, that I learned about a legacy tree. Dr. Lefkowitz has mentored more than 200 people over the past 50 years. People come up to him at meetings and proclaim, "I'm a sixth-generation Lefkowitz, and I wanted to introduce myself." Simply put, people he trained went on to train others, and so on. The root of that branch is Dr. Lefkowitz.
Dr. Lefkowitz published a truncated version of his legacy tree in The Serendipitous Scientist in 2018. It was so simple, yet so profound. It was a map laid out just like a family tree of everyone who mentored him in his career and everyone he mentored. Each generation was linked, just as in a family tree.
Most people won't have a legacy tree littered with Nobel Prize winners, just as most people don't have a family tree brimming with royals. Nonetheless, it is comforting to reflect upon our ancestry and see if we can find traces of ourselves in our heritage.
Rather than just highlighting pedigree, the legacy tree shows how you matter. It shows your imprint on others and the ripple effect of your impact extending well beyond one person. Just as with a family tree, where you may never have met your great-grandfather, you may have his nose or feature that you've carried on. In the case of a legacy tree, a part of each mentor is carried on to the next generation and is a second, equally important "family." Dr. Lefkowitz explained that his legacy tree is as essential to him as his family tree, and he is excited and proud of his mentees when they achieve, just as he is with his five children.
We spend enormous amounts of time at work and with colleagues. But how many people spend time reflecting upon their mentors and mentees? How often do we reflect upon the effect of our work? Or how our mentors impacted our work and how we affect the lives of our mentees? Most of us don't spend time reflecting on our work pedigree. Decades of work-years go by without a thought to the process, and at retirement, it is easy to feel that our work is complete. However, our ideas and expertise continue in our mentees, their mentees, and their mentees. It is a form of immortality. It is a legacy often undeclared, unrecognized, and rarely celebrated.
The simple act of mapping out our mentor lineage allows us to absorb the magnitude of the work we accomplish and its impact on the world. It shows how we fit into the world. Just like the family tree, the legacy tree illuminates our contributions. It goes well beyond the resume, well beyond titles and LinkedIn profiles. It shows we matter.
References
Lefkowitz, R. J. (2018). A serendipitous scientist. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology, 58(1), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-010617-053149
