Books, Robert and I are learning, are a bit like org charts. If you run a company, you may come across a truly remarkable person, but you just don’t see how that person fits into your organization. If you write a book, you may come accross an interesting or valuable story, but still it doesn't fit quite right into the context of your book.
This happened for us with Jill Fallon, a top-notch writer whose three blogs: Legacy Matters , Estate Legacy Vaults and the Business of Life have several unique, even remarkable aspects or so it seems to us. Instead of dealing with politics or tech sector developments, Fallon addresses the social and business issues related to death and dying. While we saw no place in Naked Conversations, we still find it worthy of reporting here.
Fallon is a lawyer and a member of the US Supreme Court bar. She has worked in politics, government, law and business. She is also twice widowed and is in the process of starting a software business to help Baby Boomers get their business-of-life affairs on order. She addresses, not only putting the paper in order for those you leave behind, but also to leave the stories of your life behind as well. Estate Legacy Vaults is her first entrepreneurial venture.
Our interview:
Q. Just what is Estate Legacy Vaults?
Estate Legacy Vaults is the corporate site for and the legal name of my start-up company. I had a regular website but it only seemed to work for a week or two before it grew stale. We are developing a software application to make it easy for people to organize the “Business of Life and Legacy.” The product under development is software, an electronic system for organizing life and legacy or ESOL™, first as a standalone application, then online as a web service.
I’m also writing a book with a working title "Growing Older is Mandatory, Growing Up is Optional- 12 Steps to Taking Care of Your Business of Life and Legacy." Along with that, I’m developing workshops and seminars so that people can do all 12 steps in a month’s time.
I use my two other Business of Life and Legacy Matters to do most of my writing. I’ve also been able to write about business issues and marketing that I never could before because they didn’t fit into the other two blogs.
All three blogs will be the platforms to sell the ESOL, the book and the seminars online.
Q Why target boomers?
Because they serve as a bridge between non-digital parents and totally digital children. Boomers are at the time when questions about mortality loom larger even as life gets sweeter. With the proliferation of tools, they can create digital personal and family legacy archives to connect generations past, present and future, if only they get their act together.
Q. What made you decide to blog? When did you start and why?
I became a blog enthusiast in 2001 and a committed believer in the power of blogs after 9/11. At that point, I had been widowed for the second time and I had learned some important lessons:
1.Someone should always know what and where everything is and who to contact.
2. The people who can help you the most are people who have been through the same thing themselves.
Blogs to me were the way for people in like circumstances to connect with each other and create natural online communities of interest where people could share stories, trade tips, offer support. So blogs became part of my business plan.
I spent almost two years studying the market, researching the technology, interviewing people, building a team, developing a business model that would work for financial institutions, writing a business plan and making presentations to large financial institutions. Repeatedly, I heard “Great idea” and “terrific presentation” but in the end, I couldn’t get a corporate investor. I knew that venture capital by that point was out of the question since no one was investing in early stage companies, especially without customers.
I didn’t have a product because I needed money to develop it. I didn’t have customers because I needed a product. It was terrifically frustrating. Here I was a lawyer, a middle-aged woman, with a great idea well-thought through on the cutting edge of a very interesting niche. But, investors would think, " she’s talking about new software which she’s never developed to sell to the financial services industry where she’s never worked and they’re supposed to sell it to a niche they haven’t addressed to solve a problem no one wants to talk about because it involves death."
In retrospect, I can see it was a hard sell. While the market is huge and certain: everyone is going to grow old, get sick and die, everyone wants to leave a legacy, no one wants to talk about it.
I wanted people to know that their legacies are more than their money and stuff. It’s who they are and what they leave behind. It’s good records, good directions and the gift of self, the love given and the lessons learned. It’s the stories in the end that are the most valued. Blogs are a perfect way to connect families and collect stories across generations.
Raising money was time-consuming and getting me away from the terrific passion I felt to help people deal more easily with what I called the Business of Life and Legacy. Because I was feeling a lack of money, I wanted to feel more abundance. I loved the notion of the “gift economy” and blogs were the way to give away what I found or learned -all in the faith that things would work out. I also had to reconnect with why I was doing all this in the first place. Finally, I wanted to become known as an expert in what I call, “life management.”
So I decided to start writing Legacy Matters. Within a week, I was number 1 on Google for Legacy Matters and I was off and running. Within a few weeks, I started Business of Life.
Q. Most blogs seem to fall into political, technical or oriented categories. You seem to be writing to older individuals, and perhaps more toward women than men. Who reads your blog?
I don’t know for sure, except where they are coming from (all over the world) what browser they use (Firefox) and the referrer (a quarter to a third from search engines.) The people who read Legacy Matters I do think are older than those that read Business of Life and I suspect more women though I get as many emails from men as from women. My target audience is boomers, and in particular, women boomers so that’s who I’m writing to.
I write principally to boomers because I’m one and because I’ve found not many people are addressing in a real way the life issues boomers are facing—like what’s it really like to get older? Does adult development continue through life and, if so, what can we expect?
What do we do with these extra 20 years of active, health and vital adulthood? How are we going to live the rest of lives, which is really saying how are we going to create the life we want to live? What should we know about losing a parent or a spouse? How do we prepare for that, can you prepare for that? What’s it like to be sick for long time or care for someone who is? What about elderly parents or relatives that live far away? How do you deal with that?
That’s what blogs can do—provide real voices, people and experiences. Since most financial decisions are made at times of life changes, financial services companies, banks and insurance companies should be reading blogs and advertising on them. I’d love to see a network of blogs writing on life changes and stages, what it’s like, what to do, what not to do. It would be an open source of collective wisdom and practical tips
Blogs can help us make better choices, now that we must make so many more in these times of accelerating change and increasing complexity. Early on, I found this quote by Peter Drucker and never forgotten it. “When the history of our time is written...the most important event will be an unprecedented change in the human condition... For the first time, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people will have choices... They will have to manage themselves...We are totally unprepared for it.”
Making choices has become work and people need help. With the declining trust in traditional authority, Wall St, the media, the government, the church, the medical establishment, people are trusting people like themselves more and they are finding them through blogs.
We also see the change from a mass economy with a mass market of millions, to a customer economy with a market of millions of ones. Corporations for the most part, haven’t adapted to that much less to the oncoming age wave that is going to transform everything. All these boomers reaching 50 are becoming even more individuated and will only become more so. Already they are biggest, the richest, the most educated generation in history. They are also the most self-actualized. And nobody’s giving them what they want – deep support.
Post 50, people begin coming into their own. You stop caring about what other people think, less about stuff and more about the quality of your own life. The journey is inward, looking for meaning. We want our lives to mean something. We want to connect and help other people live better and fuller lives. We want to make a difference, leave our mark, create our legacy.
Blogs satisfy some of the hunger people have for meaning and connection by freeing individual voices and by connecting people, everyone with complicated lives and many different interests to each other to talk about what really matters to them. After all, the stories we tell each other are how we make sense of our lives.
Shoshanna Zuboff wrote a brilliant book called The Support Economy in which she saw the great potential for wealth creation by those who could deliver the means to fulfill what people want and need to live the lives they want. So far, corporations have failed in doing so because they don’t see the value in giving people what they want because they are too busy selling product. The blogosphere is a free, always-on market intellligence resource.
Q. Additional comments?
A favorite quote by Agatha Christie: As life goes on, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned.
