Edition 41 - Don't underestimate the gravity of your absence.

Hey folks, ????

Thanks a lot for coming back to my weekly newsletter Double-click. I’m writing to you from my sick bed this week as I’ve gone for the hat trick with catching covid. Super duper frustrating but here we are.?

In this week’s edition I’d like to talk about something I’ve been mulling over recently and that’s the concept of loss. Loss and the impact it has on those that are left behind both on a small and large ways.?

Let’s double click. ????

Lost but not forgotten.??

I’ve been doing a lot of walking in the woods recently out the back of my house. Something about the silence and the smell gives my brain a real reset. While walking one day I got to thinking about what happens when trees fall down. If they’re not chopped up for firewood they don’t just disappear. They lie there for months even years slowly eroding with the comings and goings of the seasons.?

What’s interesting is over time you may come back to that fallen tree and see it look fundamentally different to when it first fell. It might be covered in moss and mushrooms and there might be an animal or two who has burrowed inside it and made it their home. Although that tree is no longer living, it continues to offer support and nutrients to everything around it. It’s still doing its bit to benefit the ecosystem it was part of even though it’s no longer part of it.?

I think there’s a lot to be said about loss in this way. It’s been a year since my mum died and what keeps her present for me is the learnings she instilled into our family which I’m now passing on to my children, and hopefully they will theirs.

No loss, whether it be someone close to you, someone you once knew or even a beloved pet, is easy. But there’s a way to look at absence that makes them way more important than a bunch of great memories in the past.?

There are two different types of loss. You might lose something that is still around today in which case you are learning to adjust your life without them being close, then there’s absolute loss. The kind that leaves you hanging. But what both of these things have in common is that any form of loss is directional.?

Dealing with loss.?

Let me explain.?

People deal with absolute loss in different ways and I’m super aware I have a tendency to be Mr. Positive about everything. So through my own losses - both my dad and my mum at this point? - what I’ve found is that thinking about the things you’ve been left with leaves a tangible essence of the person you’ve lost, but also paves the path towards a greater understanding of what that person wanted you to carry forward.?

While their voice might fade over the years then much like the tree analogy, although a person is no longer present what’s left is the figurative pieces of them in the form of values and learnings and that gives you much more.

The legacy you leave.

This really begs the question.. what does someone’s legacy really mean??

What does your own legacy mean to you??

To use a classic 80s lyric, children really are our future but this is true on a larger scale when you think about it generationally.

There’s a lot of good work going on right now to encourage humans to really think about their effect on the environment. We’re seeing it in financial services with things like circular economies and green investing growing rapidly more popular particularly amongst millennials. These businesses are on a mission to expose how the actions of individuals are affecting those that come afterwards, and it seems like only now people are starting to notice the gravity of the shadow they cast in their everyday lives.

If I look at why we started 11:FS, it was because thousands of people worldwide are underserved, overcharged and overwhelmed when it comes to the service part of financial services. Our mission is to lead the charge in changing people’s lives for good, and we want to bring financial institutions all over the globe with us on the journey. It’s not simply what we do, it’s the types of behaviours we disseminate that ensures that when myself, Jason, Ross and the other founding members of the team are long gone, the impact 11:FS has had on the industry is everlasting.?

Legacy doesn’t have to mean world changing.?

When we talk about legacy, what tends to spring to mind is a sense of dramatic, world dominating glory and fame. But circling back to our tree, even on a small scale what was left behind by that one tree amongst the forest was literally life changing to the flora and fauna that came after it.?

So whether you’re the Founder of a company, a student, a parent or a friend, your absence will leave a mark on those around you. It might only be one or two people, but those people will create a ripple that is bigger than you could ever imagine.?

See you next week. ????

D