You Choose Your Legacy

This is one of my favorite lines from Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus: House of Hades. I've read this book maybe more than 50 times by now, and this line always makes me really think. Even when I was younger, and I didn't really know what the words meant, I knew they meant something. 

Here's how I see it...

You can't really choose where you come from. You can't control things that you didn't choose, for example, where you grew up or where you went to school. When you were little, your decisions were probably made for you, before you even understood that those decisions would determine some aspect of your life and who you would become. 

But, another way of looking at it is... you get to choose who you want to be. With the expansion of social media and the rapid spread of reels, reddit and quora threads, and other videos, people learn a lot, regardless of how they are brought up. Through this exposure, you see new things and you can decide whether you want to take that in, and how you want to let that affect you. 

Because of this, people get to choose who they are, and this leads to their legacy - determined by them. They get to decide the values they want to propagate, the ideas they want to share, and the effect they want to have on people. 

Now, the context of this quote is that a demigod hero has to choose who to follow, his Roman godly parent, or fight for his friends. He chooses his friends, and that is the legacy he leaves. After his death, his plans for unification stil lcontinue, because of the impact he has made on people. 

Of course, we aren't demigod heroes. Our actions and decisions wouldn't have such far-reaching consequences, but it is still important to choose our legacies for ourselves.