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Chapter 33
On Leaving a Legacy
Duke Rohe and Jean Ann Larson
In order to make a dierence in your profession, you must be a whole person. It is not just your
educational degrees or job titles that give you credibility and make others want to work with you
and be led by you. You cannot ask people to do that which you will not do. Remember Gandhi’s
wise words: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”
It matters not if you grow professionally if you are not growing personally. If you intend to
make a dramatic dierence in your organization, you have to learn how to embrace change in
your own life. As uncomfortable or dicult as it may be, change has to begin in you before it can
inuence the change in others. Don’t just live life; experience it. Listen to it. Learn from it. Apply
its lesson. Share it. at’s how to change your world.
Contents
A Few oughts to Consider ................................................................................................... 280
Don’t Follow Wise Men! Follow What Wise Men Follow. ................................................... 280
Don’t Keep It to Yourself ..................................................................................................... 280
Grow Every Day, Every Way, Any Way ............................................................................... 280
Your Work Is the Signature of Your Reputation ...................................................................281
Dare to Interact with the World ...........................................................................................281
What’s in the Wake Behind You? .........................................................................................281
Take Time to Recharge and Reect ......................................................................................281
It Is Not Just What You Do; It Is How You Do It and How You Treat Others ..................... 282
Be Patient—with Yourself and Others ................................................................................. 282
Failure Builds Character ...................................................................................................... 282
Find Your Divine Purpose ................................................................................................... 283
Everyone You Meet Is Afraid of Something, Loves Something, and Has Lost
Something .......................................................................................................................... 283
Leverage yself.................................................................................................................. 283
280 ◾ Duke Rohe and Jean Ann Larson
A Few Thoughts to Consider
Don’t Follow Wise Men! Follow What Wise Men Follow.
Seek out what is important and intriguing to them. Sit at the feet of their understanding and
see how it applies and aects you. Learn; do not mimic it, but employ it in your own unique
way. Develop your spin on it from a new perspective. Drill down deeper than most are willing
to explore to use it in dierent ways. Author your ngerprint version of it, which causes even its
originator to marvel. Many great innovations have come from a new perspective or way of apply-
ing other knowledge.
e ultimate creative act is to express what is most authentic and individual about you.
—Eileen M. Clegg
Don’t Keep It to Yourself
Share, share, share. Your new motto ought to be, “You give, you live; you don’t, you won’t.” We
were all creatures designed for giving. By sharing, giving, or teaching what you know to others,
you will nd that you will often learn as much about the topic and yourself as the person you
are helping. ink how gratifying it has been to give help or oer an apt word to one in need.
e same applies to the work you do. What are the lessons learned, the unique application or
improvements made from which others might gain? Take time to fashion it in a way that others
can pick it up, understand, and use it. Tool-i-size it. Find ways to broadcast it throughout your
institution, throughout your profession, even throughout the world. Seed the world with your
thoughts and ideas. You never know when your little seed becomes a spark that leads to more
innovative solutions. Now you’ve done your share to make a dierence in healthcare.
Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given.
—Deepak Chopra
Grow Every Day, Every Way, Any Way
Be open to learning. Change is what causes us to transition our thinking, which ignites learn-
ing and growth. How have you grown since last week? What did you learn to do or not to
do? If you can’t answer that, then you are a great candidate for greater growth. In fact, we
can always learn more—go deeper, get broader. Seek out other perspectives. Vary your route
to and from your oce. Talk to strangers and learn from them. We have all the time in the
world, yet so little time to use it. Discover who you are, what you like, what you avoid. All of
these things oer great material to learn a new thing about you. Keep a list of what you want
to learn more about. Learn what intrigues you, develop it, and then articulate it in a manner
that is authentically you.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one
most responsive to change.
—Charles Darwin
On Leaving a Legacy ◾ 281
Your Work Is the Signature of Your Reputation
How you do what you do and how you treat others reect your values. When others think of you,
what comes to mind: friendly, helpful, genuine, and considerate? When others reect on your work,
what do they think: timely, informative, supportive, thorough, ecient, eective? What you do or
don’t do says a lot about you. Your work is your signature, so it ought to be your best. Not perfect,
just the best you can do with the resources available. Anything less and you are cheating yourself.
Work is something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.
—Maya Angelou
Dare to Interact with the World
is is the scariest and the coolest thing you could ever do. Imagine your work helping thousands
around the world. Charles Platt began this by hosting the HME listserv. He started it in 1999,
before most social media sites were even a twinkle in their inventor’s eye. Now it averages 60 posts
a month and has 3,000 members. at’s enabling interaction. Duke, at a challenge from coauthor
Jean Ann, endeavored to share an improvement tool or piece a week over the past 15 years. e
weekly eort has expanded to the development of six tool sites and a wiki for various professions
and sending CDs of tools to requestors internationally. Once you decide to interact with the
world, it changes you. You have a dual purpose in your everyday work, which is to make changes
and simultaneously translate it into tools and knowledge that may benet others. You become the
Solomon of proverbs, the Deming of profound knowledge, and the source of your profession’s
growth. It’s no longer an eort; it’s a passion.
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. e
more experiments you make, the better.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
What’s in the Wake Behind You?
When you look back through time, who are the benefactors of you being there? What have they
gained? Believe it or not, your presence moving forward through life leaves a wake behind of those
it has touched. If the wake is just you and yours, the wake is limited. If it includes those in your
profession, your spiritual friends, your special interest groups, the wake gets higher and broader.
ose aected are themselves changed by degree and are dierent because of it.
Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of oth-
ers and the stories they share about you.
—Shannon L. Alder
Take Time to Recharge and Reect
Sometimes, the best learning occurs during quiet times. rough periodic pausing and listening
to life, you can learn from it. What you do and what you say make learning material. Suspend life’s
motion long enough to see where it is coming from and where it is taking you. Only then can you
282 ◾ Duke Rohe and Jean Ann Larson
choose what to do with it. Life doesn’t want to change you; it just wants you to be able to choose
to change. Change happens regardless of you. What matters is your response. Choose to reect,
learn, and recharge.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
—SørenKierkegaard
It Is Not Just What You Do; It Is How You
Do It and How You Treat Others
Excellence is a great pursuit. Not one of perfection, but one of being perfected. It encompasses all
of who you are. Your manner of helpfulness, attentiveness, assurance, and reliability are an impor-
tant and integral part of what you do.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but
people will never forget how you made them feel.
—Maya Angelou
Be Patient—with Yourself and Others
Patience is the power to set impulse aside until you understand its control over you. To become
more patient, challenge your impatience. On the way home from work, purposely get in the slow
lane of trac and remain there. Pretend that those in front of you who are driving slowly are pro-
tecting you from getting a speeding ticket. Endeavor to remain peaceful as you travel home. Stop
the urge to change lanes when the cars beside you pass you by. You are just going to relax, listen
to music, and enjoy the ride. You are not going to let anything steal your peace. is exercise may
have to be repeated several times, but it will teach you how to pursue peace over impatience. Also,
remember that with people and relationships, going slow is fast. You cannot hurry up another’s
season of growth. If you try to rush with colleagues or loved ones, mistakes and regrets happen
that will cause you to spend more time xing!
e greatest power is often simple patience.
—E. Joseph Cossman
Failure Builds Character
You learn more from failure than from success. Failure is overrated and overweighted. It attempts
to measure your worth by what you do instead of who you are. Surely failure is painful, but that’s
where you learn about yourself. How you caused it, how you managed it, how you grew from it.
Failure is a tremendous teacher. In fact, who you are today was built from the failures you learned
from your yesterdays. So fail faster. As omas Edison was quoted to have said, “I have not failed.
I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And remember:
In the middle of diculty, lies opportunity.
—Albert Einstein
On Leaving a Legacy ◾ 283
Find Your Divine Purpose
And then gure out a way to share your gifts with others throughout your life—regardless of your
title or organization. Whether you know it or not, you are here on this earth for a purpose. Your
job is to become the best you that you can be and to make the world a better place. Find what
divinely inspires you and let it inuence what you say and do. Politics may try to separate church
and state, but no one can separate the spirit from the mind. ey are the two wings of ight. You
are truly a child of God. Learning is not completed until you express your true self. Everyone has
a gift that can help others. Discover it, develop it, distribute it in full belief, and it will make a
dierence—especially in you.
Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you’ve been and remember the per-
son you were meant to be. e person you want to be. e person you are.
—H. G. Wells
Everyone You Meet Is Afraid of Something, Loves
Something, and Has Lost Something
Your job is to make sure that you both bring out the best in each other. e greatest gift you
can give to yourself is to be a gift to another. Be the listening ear, understanding heart, sup-
porting arm, encouraging word that meets the need of another. Just as there are process ows
that need attention, there are relationship ows that require time and attention to bring out
the best in them.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what
they are capable of being.
—Goethe
e greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal
to him his own.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Leverage Thyself
So how do you leverage yourself with your colleagues, clients, and customers? How can one person
make such a positive impact that it is felt in his department, conceivably in his hospital or com-
pany, inconceivably in all of healthcare? It rst starts in the heart then grows in the mind. We all
want to make a dierence, why not a big dierence? Extraordinary people are just ordinary people
who do extraordinary thinking.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, Our deepest fear is that we are power-
ful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask
ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
—Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
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