The Messy Middle of Becoming a Legacy Builder
- Feb 12
- 3 min read
By Megan Dirks
For years I called myself all kinds of things. Empire builder. Serial entrepreneur. Multi-passionate creative. Visionary. High achieving. Highly ambitious. The list goes on. These labels were flattering and, in many circles, expected. But recently I realized something important. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself.
All of us who dare to lead and create are really building the same thing.
A legacy.
The funny part is that the word “legacy” never crossed my mind during my first ten years of entrepreneurship.
Survival, yes. Scarcity, absolutely. Hustle, always. But legacy? Not once. My entrepreneurial journey began with a level of fear that lit a fire under me. I was productive and driven, not because I felt powerful, but because I needed to keep a roof over my head, handle medical bills, and claw myself out of debt. From the outside it may have looked like I was building something impressive. On the inside it felt like trying to stay afloat while pretending I was already winning.
Even now, people look at what I’ve built around women’s stories with The Girl on the Left and assume I am living some kind of dream scenario. They see the growth, the brand, the community, and the confidence.
What they do not see is the reality that GOTL was funded by my previous business profits and my personal savings.
What they do not see is that I could step away from my full branding agency workload only because my husband’s salaried job created stability. The benefits, the investments, and the reliability of that support gave me the freedom to create something meaningful.
I do not take that for granted. And I want to be crystal clear. I am not rolling in money. I have a high output, a high vision, and a very human bank account. I reinvest aggressively into my business and future. I nurture my health when I can. I grow as resources allow. That is real entrepreneurship. Not the polished version.
What I keep coming back to is a simple truth. Building a legacy requires exactly that. Building. It is not a title. It is not a moment. It is a continuous action that happens every single day when I wake up. Every Monday. Every quarter. Every messy morning where we can choose to try again. I am and always will be an unapologetic visionary. Creating the future feels like an adventure to me, and I am here for every twist it takes.
I believe the world is ours to shape. I believe we can build lives we love, even when we are handed cards we never asked to be dealt. But it requires courage. Deep, uncomfortable inner work that most of us avoid. The willingness to examine your patterns. Your communication. Your blind spots. Your habits. Your healing. Someone external to poke holes in your self-created narratives and challenge them.
It requires becoming someone who can hold success without running from it.
A lot of people congratulate me on achieving my “big life project” with GOTL. I always laugh a little inside. If they could see the full vision and the sheer magnitude of what is coming next, they would realize this is only the first chapter. The flagship. The beginning. For the first time, I am building something foundationally led in joy instead of fear. Abundance instead of urgency. Leadership instead of survival. And I am not doing it alone. I am bringing my peers, friends, and fellow women along with me. Even the ones who think I am a little unhinged for dreaming this big. I will happily drag their brilliant selves into visibility if I must.
If you are still in solopreneur mode, hear me out. You will not stay there forever if your heart is truly in the work. Passion had a way of pushing me into expansion, and that can happen for us all. You will eventually feel the pull toward support, systems, automations, and teams. I joke that I wish I could clone myself, but the truth is that being multi-passionate means I will always want my hands on everything. I simply no longer want to do it alone.
So ask yourself two simple questions as 2026 unfolds.
What are you building?
Who are you bringing with you?
This year I am looking for women brave enough to share the messy middle of their before and after stories. Not the polished highlight reel. The real journey. The raw transformation.
And once they share it, I push them to build a brand from it so their message keeps moving forward and impacting others.
Legacy is not the ending.
Legacy is the work you do today that shapes everything still to come.
We’re all still just getting started.
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