Making a lasting impact, finding purpose in life, having meaningful experiences, engaging in the pursuit of happiness, etc. are what motivate us all. However, finding purpose in life is more than just finding something useful to do. While it is important to know what you should do, it is even more important to remember why you are doing it.
Leaving behind a legacy adds an extra dimension to this issue. Legacies involve translating a mantra into a tangible, lasting and positive impact. This book is about that extra dimension and it deals with how to scale your positive impact.
Creating a genuine and sustainable impact is a long journey. It requires you to stay focused on your mission without ignoring the fundamentals of how to scale your impact. This requires dedication. The way in which you will increase your impact will most likely not follow an existing roadmap from a similar organization, thus it can be a difficult journey. However, if you do not plan how you are going to scale your impact, your journey will be even more tough and will probably lead to failure.
With this book, we offer you several tools. The main tool, the legacy canvas, presents a way to strategically increase your impact. After all, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Having a strategy to scale is essential. We wholeheartedly believe in the potential of entrepreneurship to impact people’s lives in profoundly positive ways. However, it is easy to confuse potential impact with genuine, positive and lasting impact. With this book, we want to help individuals and organizations to make the most of the opportunities before them.
In our opinion, everyone can create an impact and increase it as long as you are committed to your goals and dare to choose certain strategies. We will show you how scaling your impact goes beyond the general view that you need to scale up and increase the size of your organization. Scaling deep and scaling out are also valid strategies and important routes to grow your impact. Even scaling down can be necessary, even if it sounds counterintuitive.
We all benefit from different methods and approaches. Our hope and mission is to motivate organizations to be more ambitious in terms of their impact. Having an impact and increasing it should be more than a green-washing or social-washing strategy. It should become a life goal for people who care deeply.
If you are serious about making a difference, this book is for you. In the words of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear, “to infinity and beyond”.
Time to get to work!