Creating your legacy is a deeply personal and profound journey. It’s essential to approach it with care, thoughtfulness, and an understanding of the physical, mental, and emotional investment required. Remember, this legacy is a gift of immense value to your loved ones, and it’s worth the effort to make it as meaningful and authentic as possible.
Hey, I’m Jim. Welcome to the “Legacy X Project.” That’s J. Thorn. How you doing, J.?
Hey everybody.
Hey, listen, this is all about creating a legacy for you and your family, right? I had this idea after cancer and heart surgery or heart failure. What would happen if I was suddenly gone? It came around to the fact that I better prepare to have some of those things I want to keep alive for my children and for my family beyond money. and cars, and houses, which I don’t have anyway.
Me neither.
And I shared it with J. here and, and we decided to move forward with what we’re calling the Legacy X Project, and it’s all about helping you create this video or audio or mental legacy of what’s up here and having it around in case someday something happens to you that you can give to your children.
Right?
Exactly. When you told me this idea, I was just blown away by it and immediately wanted, wanted to do it. And for me, I started thinking about the number of things that I want to tell my kids about life. But they’re not ready for it yet. They’re not in a stage where they’re open to hear it. And so being able to capture those ideas in a way that they can access them later is really important to me.
Really important. As a matter of fact, I will say that it’s more important than having a will. That’s important ’cause you don’t want them to have to deal with figuring out all that stuff after you’re gone, but think about situations where you would wanna be there for your kids—relationships, love, work, career, trauma, failure, all of the many things that happen to us in our lives. And if you’re not around 5, 10, 50 years from now and they don’t have anyone to ask, then you know that’s not a great thing, right? So this will allow you to do that, and it’s really not that difficult. I’ll make an argument that it’s easier than calling an attorney and answering all the questions to put a will together. This is not difficult to do. You have to decide how important this is to you, right? How important is it for you to wanna put these thoughts down and these ideas down and archive it? And we’re looking for people who really are believing that it’s important for them to do this. But it’s not gonna be easy, is it?
No. But we’re gonna be your guides here, and we’re gonna help you through it.
So that’s what this is and what we want you to do is take this journey with us. We want you to dive in and do as much or as little as you want. This is not some complex thing that you have to go through and do every single piece and part of it, you might just do a little bit of it. You might just, you might do every single thing we go through. The point of this project is for you to do something, because every second counts and you don’t know what’s going to happen beyond today. So that’s what we’re gonna focus on for this course, I guess we’ll call it where we’re gonna walk you through how to leave your legacy in audio or visual form. We’ll cover the tech, we’ll cover what to say. We’re gonna give you an outline. J. has an education background and has completely laid this whole thing out, step by step, what to say, levels of things you can talk about. We’ve got it all laid out for you. You’re not gonna have to figure out anything, you’re just gonna have to go do it.
And you, as you said, Jim, that’ll all be there, but it doesn’t mean you have to use it. If you really want the recipe, if you really want the step by step, we’ll have it for you. If you wanna kind of veer off and do your own thing, do your own thing.
And if you’re still watching this at this point, then you probably are interested in doing your own thing and getting it done, and you’re really, really focused on how powerful this can be for you. And I will just tell you this before we talk about some of the technical stuff here. This isn’t gonna be easy, right? Like you can make it easy. You can do the simple surface level easy questions. But if you really want to get deep with this and talk about things that, you know, maybe you don’t wanna have conversations with them now about that, maybe you’d want them to hear later, you’ll have that opportunity. And again, one thing to remember about all this is the why, right? We, why do we do anything in life? Is the why our purpose, right? You know, I have that tattooed on my wrist that word, why do we do things right? And you have to decide how important this is for you and your why to doing this, right? Because right now you might not be sick. You might have not had cancer like I did, or you may have not had heart failure, and you’re saying to yourself, eh, I don’t really need to do that. It’s the same exact reason you don’t put a will together because you think you’re invincible and you think that everything’s gonna be fine forever. But the reality is for Gen Xers especially, is that we’ve reached our stage in our life where health is starting to diminish and things could change at any point, especially after Covid. Right.
Flip side to that is, you know, we’ve talked about this, both our fathers have passed, right. And the number of times I wish, over the past five years, I could have asked my dad a question about my business or about raising kids. And he’s not around anymore to answer them. That’s right.
So let’s get into some of the nitty gritty of how this whole thing is gonna work. I think we wanna talk a little bit about the technicality of this. So let’s keep the tech stuff on this pretty simple. All right? It’s not a big deal. Okay? Everyone’s got their phone in their pocket that you could do this on if you want to. You could literally be on a walk, be anywhere. What I do is I, when I have something I wanna say, or if I wanna do something, I’m out on a walk or I come out of the gym or free time, or in an airport or wherever. I turn the camera on, I point it at myself, and I record myself. That’s what I do. Okay. It’s simple, it’s quick. There’s no script. It’s just me talking to my kids down the road, right? You’re planning on doing audio, right?
I am, yeah. I’m doing audio files. I am doing it with my laptop. Okay. Because I have a podcast mic, but again, you could use your phone. Almost all phones have a built-in recorder, and so the idea is to capture ’em on your phone. And then we’re gonna have a more detailed thing because the tech kind of changes. So, we want this video to be useful for years to come, so we’ll do a separate little sort of more technical piece, but think about the way you would normally share things. So if you’re on an iPhone, you’re doing video, you could probably share that through the Apple system. If you’re on an Android and you do video, Google Photos will hold videos. Because ultimately, there’s two phases to the tech. There’s the capture and then there’s the share and we’re gonna help you through both of those components. You gotta capture the media first, and then you have to have the ability to share it with the people you wanna share it with down the road.
It’s just not that difficult. It really isn’t, right? So we’re not gonna get into the specifics on the tech because everybody’s got a computer in their pocket. You can use that. You can use your laptop, you can use whatever you want. Just do it right. Video, audio, however you want to do it, whichever way will make you comfortable. We’ll have examples here that you’ll be able to look at. I’ll show some of the ones I’m doing, J. will post some of the ones he’s doing, and the point is whatever makes you comfortable. You do it that way. But the point again, is to get it done. So don’t let the tech slow you down.
That’s exactly what I was gonna say. Don’t procrastinate with the technology, especially dudes. It’s really easy to do all this research on the right camera, the right microphone. That’s not important. That’s not what’s important. Don’t get hung up on that stuff.
No. The most important thing is that you get it done right. So some of the videos that I do, like I said, I, I just do it when I’m out on a walk or something. And you know, I’m randomly walking around my city, sweating, talking to my kids. And that’s, that’s the type of content that is real, that your kids are gonna love. And that is gonna be something that they’re gonna go, “Oh, this was a raw, real conversation with my father.” That is gonna pay dividends for you, make you sleep good at night. Right. Like when you know that they have that stuff. So that’s the tech stuff. Don’t freak out about the tech stuff. Okay.
Let’s talk a little bit about the mindset and how you wanna approach this. I think from a physical standpoint, be well rested. Be excited to do it. I think if you’re under a lot of strain, if there’s something happening at the office, if there’s family drama happening, then postpone the recording. That’s not the time you wanna be doing it, right? You want to be in a very positive, forward-thinking mindset. And so it might be worth waiting for that moment if things are just really chaotic in your life right now.
Yeah. And there’s gonna be a couple ways that you could go through this curriculum. Okay? There’s gonna be some of you who are gonna be like, I’m gonna bust it all out in the next six hours or two hours. There’s gonna be some of you who are gonna do it over the next six months, right? However you wanna do it is fine. But just do it. And you do wanna be in the right mindset when you do this, and you don’t, in my opinion, you don’t need to rehearse this stuff, and that’s why we’ve created this roadmap for you, so you don’t have to think. Basically all we’re asking you to do is look at a list of potential things you want to talk about, questions, and then just answer them. You don’t have to think about what to say. You don’t have to write it out. I know some people are perfectionists and they wanna put it all down and write, read a script. If you wanna put a teleprompter up and do that and for your kids, then fine. But we don’t think that’s necessary.
No. And I know what some of you might be thinking. If you know us, you’re like, yeah, that’s fine, because you guys are on stages and you’re behind microphones and you have a lot of practice doing this. What if I’m not that guy? What if I don’t have a lot, I don’t speak well, or I don’t think I speak well, or I don’t have a lot of practice at it? And my response is, remember who your audience is. These are your kids or your nephews or the people you care about the most. And, and just speak to them from the heart and do it from a place of gratitude. Think about how fortunate you are to have the opportunity to pass this along to them, and that’s gonna put you in the right mind frame.
Yeah, definitely. And if you mess up, don’t worry about it. Just keep rolling. You know, imagine you’re an actor in a movie and they’re just like, keep rolling, rolling, rolling. There’s no perfection in legacy, right? There’s no perfection in the words coming outta your mouth. The whole point of it is to be candid and open and authentic. So go into it with that mindset: that I am here to deliver something. That someday perhaps my children are going to see, and it’s going to help them through a tough situation. That’s your why. So when you wanna control your mindset, you want to control your why, right? Because if you can, if you can change your mind, you can change your life. So think about this as something you’re doing for them, right? Like we talk about in the video. What’s the best way to make sure that you accomplish something important? Well, you figure out who it affects and then you don’t let them down. Right? That’s what this is. This is for your children, and by doing this, you’re not letting them down.
And I’ll just throw this little bit of meta in here, Jim. Yeah. I think we’re modeling this for you guys. We are speaking to you. We’re not on a script. We don’t have a teleprompter. This isn’t a fancy production. We’re speaking from the heart to you. We have a few notes and things we wanna hit and that’s it. Like there’s not a ton of prep here. We’re just speaking from our heart, from you know what and, and what we think is important for you to hear.
Yep. So remember guys, go through, get it done. Figure out how you want to do it. Have the right mindset, and you’ll have a lot of success moving forward.