Creation over Consumption: The Key to Success, Margin, and Legacy

Materialism: The Detrimental Distraction

Let’s face it. We live in a materialistic world. Billboards, ads on every screen, television commercial and music app. Everywhere we go, we are encouraged to consume. We go to the grocery store with a list of five things and we leave with twenty. Why is that? All people like to have things and, to many people, buying things can be a rush. As my daughter said literally yesterday, “why go to a store if we can’t buy anything?” It’s fun to have and to own and to buy. But in a finite world with limited resources, time, and energy, a consumption-driven life will lead to failure in your finances, career, parenting, and eventually your legacy.

The Alternative

What is the alternative? For every one thing consumed, there was someone who created it. Who is on the winning side of the transaction? The consumer or the creator? Both will argue it was them, but who is it really?

When you create, you add value to the world, you leave your mark, and your share your genius with others. Oh, and you get paid for it (monetarily or by more intrinsic means). Creating does the exact opposite of what consumption does. It improves your finances, it adds credibility to your career, it opens the creative minds of your children to create as well, and it leaves a lasting legacy, an imprint of yourself on the world which we all eventually leave behind. Would you rather leave behind your creations, which were intended for other people, or would you rather leave behind your many “toys” to people who will either sell them or not appreciate them as you did?

At the end of your days, would you define success as all of those things you bought, used, and leave behind to be sold? Or would you define success as your legacy, the things you did and created and the value you added to the world around you?

Not a single person would disagree that when you make more than you spend, you have margin. When you create more than you consume, you also build margin, into your life, your career, your finances, and yes, your legacy. While you are consuming, you cannot be creating. Likewise, while you’re creating, you can’t be consuming. So you are either eliminating margin from your life, or you are building it. There is no in-between.

Let me add the disclaimer that we as humans need to consume to live. The key; however, is not living to consume.

When you create and add value in your career, it gives you the respect and attention you need to create even greater, bolder things. When you’re only worried about consuming perks, benefits, pay, or whatever other self-centered approach you might be taking to your professional or personal life, you are eliminating potential margin and falling deeper and deeper into the abyss of mediocrity and invisibility that gets you nowhere in your career, life, or relationships, thereby limiting the amount that you can create, if you had the desire to. Do you see the cycle? It goes both ways. It can be for positive or negative, but the cycle will persist either way. It is up to you to choose which cycle you will put into motion. Choose wisely my friends.