Dont make history make the future.
[Music]
hello uh
wonderful people my name is casey bailey
and
today i’m going to talk to you about
legacy and i’m going to talk to you
about
what i think is the importance of
focusing not so much
on making history but on
making the future and i’m going to try
and get into where this idea came from
and hopefully give you some tips on how
to think about things
going forward so
this concept kind of crystallized for me
a few years ago i was on holiday with my
wife in barcelona
and my wife is a visual artist an
amazing visual artist and i kind of like
art
and we decided that when we were in
barcelona we were going to take in
everything that we could there’s so many
different cultural sites so many amazing
things to see
and we wanted to see all but the one
thing that we specifically knew that we
wanted to see before we went
was a sagrada familiar uh church it’s
like a big
church cathedral type building in the
middle of barcelona
stunning and we’ve seen pictures of it
and we were like this is it this is what
we’re going to see
in barcelona and we got there
and it’s stunning we stand in front of
it and we’re looking up at this amazing
building that’s it’s like everything
you’ve seen on the pictures or
the postcards but it’s bigger and it’s
even more beautiful
and it was designed by a guy called
gaudi and
as we walk around the building i’m
talking to my wife about the design and
what i think is amazing about it
and we get to this part of the building
which looks cleaner
than the side that we’ve just seen nicer
and i look up and there’s a man on a
crane
and he looks like he’s doing work on the
building i said to my wife babe he’s
he’s working on the building like this
they’re working on it like building it
and she said don’t be ridiculous it’s
like a grade one listed building like
they wouldn’t be working on
the sagrada familia uh they’re probably
sandblasting it that’s why this side
looks so much cleaner
so i said okay i’ll let that slide and
off we went and
back in the hotel it was bugging me i
kind of couldn’t get it out of my head
so i looked it up
and it turns out the sagrada familiar
was still being built and even right now
as i’m talking to you
the sagrada familia is still being built
and it turns out the reason is this man
gowdy when he was commissioned to build
the building
he knew that the size and the magnitude
of building he wanted to design and he
wanted to create
they’d never be able to build it in his
lifetime he he would
not be alive by the time it was
completed and so he came up with a plan
and his plan was he would design one
face of the building
that was considerably smaller than the
other two and he would design it in a
way that it could be built while he was
alive
but it was distinctive and because of
the way he built this face
any architect who came onto the project
once he passed away
wouldn’t really be able to change his
original design
and he started thinking not just about
what he was doing right now and what
people would say about it and wanting to
see his amazing building
he started thinking about what people
were going to have to do
when he wasn’t even around anymore and
he shaped what they were going to have
to do
when he wasn’t even around anymore so
despite my wife thinking that they
weren’t still working on the building
they were
they still are and this gets me thinking
about
legacy and this idea that we have in our
head
about legacy because i think often when
we think about legacy we think about
what will people say about me like how
will i be reviewed
what will people say once i’m gone and
there’s lots of different dictionary
definitions of legacy but one is
around what we what somebody’s leaves
for us what our predecessor
leaves for us and i think when we think
about legacy we don’t think so much
about what we leave
we think about what will people say
about what i leave
and what gowdy did is he shapes what
people would
do when he was gone not just what would
be said about him
what will people actually do when i’m
gone
if you think about another example of
this as a great example right here in
birmingham
which is a town hall if you ever look at
or go past a town hall
it’s a huge building and you might think
it was built relatively recently or you
might think it was built a long time ago
but what’s interesting about it is
when it was built this the population of
birmingham was less than a hundred
thousand
and this building is still functional
still used today
and the reason is when they built it
they knew the population of the city was
growing rapidly and they’d made a
conscious decision let’s not build a
building for what we need
now let’s build a building that will be
able to serve this city
long after we’re all gone which it still
does to this day
and i think for me i for a long time was
caught up very much on
the idea of what can i achieve what can
be my achievements and i remember
sitting in a ceremony where there was a
ward in a blue plaque
to someone who had long since passed
away and they were talking about all of
this person’s achievements
and i started thinking to myself i
haven’t done enough
and most people who know me would say
casey you’ve done quite a bit but
in my head i was like i haven’t like
this man has done all of this
i haven’t done enough but what i’ve come
to realize
is the real important things that we do
and not the things that come with the
accolades and the titles
there is something bigger more rewarding
and more important that we can do
and ultimately most of us will never
have a sagrada familia
most of us when time goes by we won’t be
in the history books they won’t write
our names down
we will not become part of history but
we will build the future
we will shape it we will turn it into
what we want it to be
and sometimes we do that without seeing
it
and that’s what makes it difficult and
when i think about that
um i want to share a story it’s really
it’s a series of stories but i want to
share a story about
how you can affect something and not
even see
those effects so i’m a teacher amongst a
million other things i’m a teacher
and years ago i’m older than i look i
promise
years ago i taught a boy and he was an
unruly character
he got into problems he got into trouble
and
it seemed like he wasn’t going to make
it through school and i spent a lot of
time working with him and it was a
big part of my job to work with him and
students like him
and he made it through school he
survived school as he puts it
went after his a-levels qualified to be
a teacher
and the first time i saw him after he
qualified he said i wanted to be a
teacher
because i wanted to have the impact on
people’s lives that you had on mine
and that’s powerful like beyond words if
i think about all of the achievements
that i have
that surpasses all of them that somebody
feels like they wanted to be able to do
for people what i did for them
and he told me a story about a boy who
is teaching the boy is a very talented
dancer
and he’s a very talented writer and he
had the opportunity to go on two kind of
like residentials or camps
at the same time and he was stressing
because he had to choose does he go on a
writing camp does he go on the dancing
camp
and his teacher my former student told
me the story about how he said to this
boy
don’t close doors on yourself because
you don’t know
whether you’d be able to somehow do both
and what the boy did in the end is he
checked with the leaders of the groups
and the camps and he did
most of the writing residential then he
went off to the dance trip
and did the writing residential remotely
in the evening
and the significance of my former
student telling me this story isn’t that
he made this big impact on this boy’s
life
i told him to stop closing doors on
himself when he was 15 years old crying
in my office
i can’t do this i’ll never do that i
never i told him stop closing doors on
yourself
because other people will close doors on
you all your life
you don’t need to do it to yourself and
he told me this story
not to show me the impact that he’d had
on this boy but to remind me of the
impact that i had had
on him and he said the boy told him when
i’m grown up and i’m famous because
that’s what we all say when we’re 15
when i’m famous
because that’s the you know pinnacle
when you’re when you’re 15 years old
i’m going to write a book and the book’s
going to be called stop
closing doors on yourself now you might
think that’s a terrible example
of when you can shape the future without
knowing because i clearly know because
i’m telling you all about it
but i didn’t just come up with those
words i didn’t wake up one morning and
go
stop closing doors on yourself that’s
something that my dad said to me
and he said it to me throughout
different parts of my life
but when i was a boy and i thought i
couldn’t do certain things
he told me casey stop closing doors on
yourself
other people will do that enough for you
and it’s stuck
and because he said that to me i said it
to this boy and because i said it to
this boy
he said it to another boy and now you
have someone talking about writing a
book about it
and if in 10 years time 20 years time 30
years time somebody was to try and write
my life story
they wouldn’t mention it it would have
no significance what
no one would talk about the time that i
taught that boy and told him to stop
closing doors on himself
but if his student writes a book
and in a hundred years time one of my
great-grandchildren reads the book or
your great-grandchildren or anybody
reads the book and decides they’re going
to do something today
because they’re not going to close a
door on themselves how profound could
the
impact of my dad’s words to me become
words that he never really thought about
the impact of
and that sticks with me because
we get lost in what can i achieve
and we lose sight of what can i do what
can i just actually do
and that brings me to a quote from
another
great artist i would put him in the
gowdy category i don’t know if everybody
would and that great artist
is tupac shakur and tupac shakur said
i am not saying that i’m going to change
the world
but i guarantee that i will spark the
mind
that will change the world and that is
another
person thinking beyond themself like
let’s not worry about
what people will say about me what will
they do
what will what i have said today or done
today make people
do and so what i want to ask
of you really is
to think about the way you are going to
make the future
and i want you to
accept the fact or focus on the fact
that
it’s not that important what people say
about you after you’ve gone it’s more
important
what people do because you were there
and how can you make sure that what you
do
makes other people do something or feel
something which is positive
even if all you do is make someone smile
in fact
especially if what you do is make
someone smile
focus on what they do because you were
there i also want you to accept that
you can’t necessarily see the amazing
impact of all of your great work
you’re not necessarily going to see the
outcomes of all the great things that
you do
you can’t build your forest around you
but you can plant it
and it will grow and really i want you
to know that i know it’s a bit cliche
and cheesy
but the future really is yours but it’s
not made
it’s not finished you have to build it
you have to create it
you have to make it what you want it to
be
and there’s a reason why i think it’s
important to think like this
because when you start thinking about
the impact of what you do what people do
because
you were there it takes the burden off
worrying about
achievements accolades
get get that out of your mind what is
going to happen
because i was here is gonna allow you to
focus
and act in a different manner when you
think about the fact that you won’t see
all of the amazing outcomes of your work
you stop worrying about whether you’ve
done enough like how often do we get
caught up in
have i achieved enough have i done
enough have i done what i wanted to do
today
you’ve done more than you know you’ve
done more today than you even realized
and tomorrow it will have an impact that
you won’t even see
so get out of your mind this idea of
have i done enough
you’ve done more than you know and the
reason
that i kind of want us to accept that
we’re building the future
is because then we’ll take it seriously
we will
mold it every single day and even if you
only make this much of the future
you’ll want that bit that you make to be
amazing
nothing that you do is throw away the
way you speak to people
the way you act around people the way
you treat people the hog that you give
to the person that you don’t really know
but you could see that they needed a hug
these things have a knock-on effect in
building
the future that we live in
and other than that uh i’ve just got one
more thing that i want you to do
and it’s not really from me it’s from my
dad
and that thing is don’t close doors on
yourself
other people will do that enough and you
don’t need to do it
we won’t all have our sagadra familia we
won’t all go down in history
but we will all make the future thank
[Music]
you