What is a Legacy? How to Create Yours
A legacy is what remains after you're gone. Not just money or property, but the impact you made on people's lives. It's the stories your grandchildren tell about you, the values your children practice because you modeled them, the lessons you taught that echo through generations.
Most people think about legacy too late—during retirement or illness. But you build your legacy now, in daily choices and conversations. Understanding what makes a legacy meaningful helps you create one worth leaving. Our Stages of Life framework shows how legacy-building happens across all nine life phases, not just the final one.
For questions to spark legacy conversations, see our questions to ask family members guide with 640+ prompts for capturing these stories.
Article Snapshot
- Legacy includes material inheritance, values and beliefs, and the stories people tell about you
- Most people remember loved ones for character and relationships, not accomplishments or wealth
- You build legacy through consistent actions over time, not grand gestures
- Sharing your life story preserves context future generations need to understand their roots
- Digital legacy (online accounts, photos, videos) requires planning to survive long-term
- Professional recording ensures your voice and stories survive in studio quality for generations
What Actually Defines a Legacy?
Legacy gets reduced to estate planning and wills. But material inheritance forms the smallest part of what you leave behind.
Material Legacy: What You Own
Material legacy includes property, savings, possessions, and heirlooms. This matters—financial inheritance can change your children's lives. A paid-off house, college funds, or investment accounts provide security and opportunity.
But money alone doesn't create meaningful legacy. Wealthy people can leave nothing but family conflict over inheritance. Poor people can leave deep legacy through love and wisdom. The money matters less than what it represents and how you talk about it.
Values Legacy: What You Believe
Values legacy means the principles you lived by and passed down. Did you value honesty? Your children notice when you admit mistakes instead of lying. Did you value community? They remember you volunteering, helping neighbors, showing up.
You transmit values through modeling, not lecturing. Your children watch how you treat service workers, handle conflict, and respond to setbacks. These observations shape their character more than any advice you give.
Story Legacy: Who You Were
Story legacy preserves your experiences, personality, and journey. Your grandchildren won't remember you directly. They'll know you through stories: "Grandma escaped war and built a new life in America." "Grandpa turned down a big promotion to spend more time with us." "They met at a jazz club and danced until dawn."
Stories make you human to future generations. Without them, you become a name on a family tree. With them, you become a person they feel they know.
Why Do People Care About Legacy?
The drive to leave a legacy runs deep. It addresses fundamental human needs for meaning, connection, and continuity.
The Psychological Need for Meaning
People want their lives to matter beyond their own existence. Legacy answers the question: "Will anything I did outlast me?" A teacher who inspired students, a parent who raised good humans, a friend who showed up during hard times—they leave impact that ripples forward.
Research on life satisfaction shows that people facing death regret relationships they neglected and people they didn't help, not careers or possessions. Legacy built on connection matters more than legacy built on achievement.
Family Continuity and Belonging
Legacy connects generations. When you share your grandmother's immigration story, you teach your children where they come from. When you explain why your family celebrates certain traditions, you give them roots.
Children who know their family history show higher self-esteem and resilience. They understand they're part of something larger than themselves. They see how their family overcame challenges, which gives them confidence to face their own.
The Desire to Be Remembered
Everyone wants to be remembered accurately, not idealized or forgotten. You want future generations to know who you actually were—your humor, your struggles, your growth, your humanity.
This drives people to finally share difficult stories: "I want them to know I wasn't always this way." "I need them to understand why I made that choice." "They should know what really happened." These conversations preserve truth that otherwise dies with you.
How Do You Build a Meaningful Legacy?
Legacy isn't something you declare. You build it through consistent actions and conscious choices over decades.
Live Your Values Consistently
Your legacy reflects who you were consistently, not who you were at your best. If you value family but skip every gathering for work, your children remember the absences. If you preach honesty but lie regularly, they learn dishonesty.
The gap between stated values and lived values determines legacy more than the values themselves. Small, repeated actions reveal your actual priorities.
Share Your Story While You Can
Your life story contains lessons, context, and humanity that only you can share. Your children think they know why you chose your career, but do they? They assume they understand your marriage, but have you told them the full story?
Prompts like "Can you describe a pivotal moment that directed your path in a new way?" or "What's the hardest choice you've had to make and who helped you make it?" reveal stories you've never shared. These conversations build legacy by preserving your complexity.
Telloom uses these exact prompts in professional interviews designed to capture life stories. Trained interviewers know how to ask follow-up questions that draw out complete narratives, not just surface answers.
Document What Matters
Memory fades and stories get simplified with each retelling. Documenting your story in your own voice preserves accuracy and emotion that written accounts miss.
Video recording captures your personality in ways writing can't—your gestures, your expressions, your tone when sharing difficult memories or joyful ones. Future generations hear your actual voice sharing your actual story.
For tips on recording yourself or family members, see our guide on how to record family video interviews.
What About Digital Legacy?
Digital legacy includes everything you've created or stored online: email accounts, social media profiles, photos, videos, documents, and creative work. This matters more than previous generations realized.
What Happens to Your Digital Content?
Most social media accounts get deleted after inactivity. Cloud storage subscriptions expire. Email accounts shut down. Family photos stored only on Google Photos may vanish if no one knows your password.
Planning digital legacy means documenting your accounts, storing passwords securely, designating someone to manage or close accounts, and migrating important content to permanent storage.
How to Protect Digital Legacy
Create an inventory of digital accounts and where content lives. Store passwords in a password manager with emergency access. Download and back up irreplaceable photos and videos locally. Share access information with a trusted person who will handle your digital estate.
For video content specifically—family recordings, life story interviews, or personal messages—use services designed for long-term preservation. Consumer platforms change policies, get acquired, or shut down. Archival services commit to maintaining content across technology changes.
How Can You Capture Your Legacy Story?
Knowing you should preserve your story differs from actually doing it. Most people postpone these conversations until health declines or memory fades.
The Questions That Draw Out Legacy
Certain questions reveal legacy stories better than others. Instead of "Tell me about your life" (too broad), try:
- "What values do you hope to pass on to future generations?" - Reveals what you hold most important
- "How do you want to be remembered?" - Shows how you see your own legacy
- "What lesson from your life is crucial for younger people today?" - Distills wisdom from experience
- "What tradition or knowledge have you inherited that must continue?" - Connects past to future
- "What are you most proud of in life?" - Highlights what you value about your own journey
These prompts come from Telloom's database of 630+ interview questions designed specifically to capture legacy stories. They've been tested through thousands of family interviews.
Why Professional Recording Matters for Legacy
You can record yourself on your phone. But legacy content deserves quality that lasts generations. Poor audio makes videos unwatchable. Bad lighting obscures facial expressions. Rambling without structure buries important stories.
Professional services provide trained interviewers who ask follow-up questions, studio-quality recording equipment for clear audio and video, structured conversation that covers key life areas, secure archival storage with redundant backups, and transcription that makes hours of video searchable.
Telloom offers exactly this: professional interviewers conduct guided conversations in studio quality, videos are stored in a private family archive with transcripts and AI summaries, and content remains searchable and shareable with family for generations.
When Should You Record Your Legacy?
Now. The best time was years ago. The second best time is today.
People wait until retirement to record life stories, but memory is sharpest before then. They wait until a health scare prompts urgency, but by then cognitive decline may have started. They wait until someone asks, but many die before that conversation happens.
If you're thinking "I should really interview my parents," do it now. If you're thinking "I should record my own story for my grandchildren," start this month. If you're thinking "We should capture our marriage story together," schedule it this week.
What Do People Actually Remember?
When someone dies, what do people say at the funeral? They share stories. They describe character. They remember kindness, humor, generosity, strength during hardship. They rarely mention career achievements or financial success.
"She made everyone feel welcome." "He showed up every time we needed him." "She taught me to see beauty in ordinary moments." "He admitted his mistakes and apologized." These remembrances form real legacy.
The Gap Between Achievement and Legacy
High achievers sometimes leave small legacy because they prioritized wrong things. The executive who built an empire but missed every family dinner. The doctor who saved lives but never shared her own story. The wealthy person who left money but not values.
Conversely, ordinary people leave powerful legacy through presence and love. The grandfather who taught patience through fishing trips. The mother who modeled resilience through hardship. The friend who listened without judgment.
Legacy comes from who you were to people, not what you achieved for yourself.
How Stories Keep Legacy Alive
Your great-grandchildren won't meet you. They'll know you only through stories others tell. This makes story preservation critical.
Record the stories you want them to know: how you met your spouse, what you learned from failure, why you chose your path, what you hope for their future. These stories give them a relationship with you across time.
Legacy is what lasts after you're gone. It's built in how you treat people, what you value, and the stories you share. You can't control how you're remembered completely, but you can influence it through conscious choices.
Live your values visibly. Share your story honestly. Document what matters professionally. Build relationships that outlast you. And don't wait until you're facing death to think about what you're leaving behind.
Your legacy is being written now, in daily choices and conversations. Make sure the story you're building is the one you want told.
