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A man I deeply admire, Norman Lear, has died and I can’t even be sad about it.

You may know Lear as the creator of some of TV’s most legendary shows: All in the Family, Maude, One Day at a Time, Good Times, The Jeffersons, and more. At one point he had seven hit sitcoms on the air at one time.

His career spanned eight decades, from writing for Danny Thomas, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis all the way up to working with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the South Park creators, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

He was 101, and almost right up to his death he was still creating, with an autobiography that came out in 2015—for which he went on tour at age 93—a 2016 documentary about his life, the 2017 reboot of One Day at a Time, a podcast he hosted, and plans for future creative collaborations and productions.

He married—several times—and had six children and four grandchildren.

He followed his passion for social justice and civic responsibility and created an organization called People for the American Way, to help combat the rise of religious censorship and preserve the separation of church and state.

In 2000 he bought one of the few extant copies of the Constitution of the United States and sent it on tour for all Americans to have the opportunity to see firsthand, and he worked to promote civic engagement. In 2003 he formed Declare Yourself to spur young people to vote, registering more than a million new young voters within a year, and nearly two million by the 2008 election.

Norman Lear, to me, embodies a life fully lived, not just as an artist but as a person. He pursued his creative passions for the entirety of his life, and he turned his success in that arena to his other passions as well.

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His shows broke barriers long before there was an Ellen or a Will & Grace. They addressed real issues, like bigotry and prejudice, inequality and social injustice, racism, feminism, and terrorism—but in the form of entertainment, wildly funny with a real emotional punch, giving meaning to the messages through a deeply human lens.

What If You’re Not Norman Lear?

Now let’s be real. Norman Lear achieved astounding success in his career. You can’t pay $8 million for an actual copy of the Constitution if you haven’t, and for a time he was one of Forbes‘s wealthiest Americans.

Not all artists will rise to those heights. Not most, if we’re being honest. It’s easy to sustain a creative career and follow your passions if you’re making millions while you’re doing it.

But what if you’re not? What if your creative career means dragging your exhausted self out of bed every morning an hour before your family wakes up to carve out a little bit of time to devote to your writing? What if it means working day after day through the challenges of storytelling, the limitations of life, and your own self-doubts about your skill and talent and whether your writing is even worth doing?

It’s easy to sustain a creative career and follow your passions if you’re making millions while you’re doing it. But what if you’re not?

Norman Lear didn’t start out of the top of his game. In fact he had an unusually difficult upbringing, with a distant and critical father who eventually went to jail for three years, leaving Norman to live with relatives for stretches of time. He joined the military and flew more than fifty combat missions in World War II; sold furniture door-to-door; did sidewalk photography—whatever he had to do to put food on the table until he got his first break.

Even after his string of astonishing successes, Lear had failures—including more than half a dozen TV shows that flopped. Every creative career, even the phenomenally successful ones, has valleys as well as peaks. After the mid-eighties Lear never had another hit show.

Read more: "Failure IS an Option"

But it didn’t stifle his creativity. He still wrote, still produced, still collaborated with other artists…still kept getting up to the plate to take a swing.

And forty years after his last big hit went off the air, he continues to have an influence on other artists, other shows, and on the American psyche.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that every person dies twice: once when we shuffle off this mortal coil, and once when our name is spoken on Earth for the last time.

Lear’s legacy was a towering one. His name will no doubt be spoken for many generations to come.

But your legacy will live on as well. Whether you publish or not, whether you become a bestseller or not, your creative work is what will survive you.

The doing of that work is so much of what gives our own life meaning and purpose and fulfillment in the time we have. But the legacy of it is what will define your life and who you are for those who come after you. 

You Are Already Creating Your Legacy

I think a lot lately about legacy, and I think many artists do. What will outlive us, what impact might we make in the world after we’re gone?

My mom and stepfather are not writers, nor even creatives in the strictest sense. But not long ago I started a writing project with them.

Periodically I send them questions about their lives when they were younger: who they were, what they wanted and dreamed of and loved, what they did, what they felt and thought, what their lives were like. They may write their responses or just talk through their answers and record them, but I’m slowly compiling them into a written record of who they are.

It’s a way for our family to know them more intimately as people, not just parents. But I think it’s also been rewarding and nourishing for them to think about these times and share them, to look at their lives through the perspective of who they are now and reflect on how their experiences shaped them. I think they both like the idea that in some way they will continue to live on for us through their words after they’re gone.

And isn’t that what we all hope for in our writing? Not only that we may find enjoyment and fulfillment and growth in the doing of it, but that our having done it may make an impact on someone else?

Read more: "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells the Stories?"

It may not be millions of people. It may just be a handful who read your words after you’re gone. But how many people would you have to impact to make it meaningful to you? If you affect and connect with even a single soul, how many more numbers do you need for it to feel as if your words mattered?

What if those who are left behind look through your writing and think, Look how they pursued what they loved. What if they read something you wrote, anything, a story, a scene, a moving turn of phrase, and are affected by it, changed by it, moved? What if they think, as I do about Norman Lear, What a life well lived, and your passing is cause for celebrating how you lived?

I think most artists would love to achieve the heights attained by Norman Lear—money and fame and influence. But those are just the external rewards of living a creative life. Wouldn’t it be lovely and empowering to realize how much of what makes a creative life fulfilling is already within your power?

Over to you, my friends. Do you think about your writing as part of your legacy? What’s the mark you hope to leave?

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