Long ago, in a galaxy away, far away – in other words, during my sophisticated year at a small college of liberal arts in Pennsylvania – a professor offered a course called “Shakespeare and Modernity”. When asked what the reading list would be, he replied – on the contrary – “a little Shakespeare and Little Nietzsche”. The other semester, he offered a course called “Shakespeare and Antiquity”. I suspect you will not believe me, but again he said the reading list would be a little Shakespeare and a little Nietzsche. I lost a C note when bet my roommate that, before we graduated, the boy would learn a course called “Antiquity and Modernity”, the reading list would be a little Shakespeare and a little Nietzsche. The teacher got a visiting professor before we graduated – otherwise, I'm sure I would be a hundred richest dollars today. I didn't get any of those courses and I didn't read a lot of Nietzsche, but another day, I encountered something he wrote that hit me: “If someone has a In life, one can endure anyone like. “
If you asked me to identify one thing that is the only best predictor of long-term family success and happiness for a long time, I want to say success, continuity and happiness over two, three, four or more, really geological in the life of a family-I will say that successful families are related to a group of deeply shared values. They have a common purpose, and everyone knows they do; They realize that they share a feeling of where they are going together and what they are trying to realize as a family. They have a deep understanding of what is everything. And because they do this, they can endure almost anything and face almost any challenge or obstacle, as Nietzsche said.
Some families have a natural understanding of why; It develops organically over time, without conscious thoughts or effort. It's just in their genes. Other families must work on it; They must tease it; They have to work to find it. Over the past four decades I have worked with ultra -rich families, the best process I have found for those who have to find their “why” in life and reach the approximation around it is to work together as a family to create a family mission statement.
A statement of the family mission is the uniquely personalized statement of a family for their “why”. While the mission statement of each family is different, the mission statements in general should express the vision of the family of who they are, as they are different from other families and what they seek to perpetuate, their sense of purpose and understanding, their understanding of their family history and traditions; Their expression of heritage they wish to pass on to future generations.
process
Creating a family mission statement can be one of the most intensely unifying and powerful experiences in family life. This assertion often creates a fair amount of skepticism. After all, how can a piece of paper be – and what is not even a binding legal document in that force – be such a powerful force? Of course, the answer is that its strength and influence stem not from the mission statement itself – as strong and powerful as it may be – but from the process of its creation and its review regularly. When it is done well, that is, when the document is not just a simple collection, the process of creating a family mission statement requires that family members will participate significantly so that the statement coming out is the product of significant reflection, discussion and debate. While no one family member can find the final statement perfect – is not a statement of the individual mission, after all – the final product must be the one that all family members approve. Working together to articulate a statement that belongs to everyone collectively and reflects the collective judgments and decisions of the family can be extremely powerful, even occasionally surprisingly detecting.
But families who stop at this point do not receive the true benefits of a family mission statement: even a statement of the perfect mission designed, if moved to a table drawer, will never have the impact it can. Families that eventually succeed in combining the family mission statement in the structure of their lives together as families are families who return to it periodically and ask themselves four critical questions:
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Do we still believe it? Does the statement of our family mission still accurately reflect who we are?
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If not, what should we do to make it correct again?
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If it is still an accurate expression of our values, vision and mission in life, or to the extent it is, have we lived our lives in accordance with it?
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And if we don't have it, if we are inadvertently left, what should we do to get back on the right track?
If families answer these questions frankly, the answer to the third question will almost always be a version of “No”: “Well, not always”; “Not enough”; “Not really”, and sometimes just a “flat” “because the essence of being human is wrong, making mistakes and fall short. We are often out of traces – we do things we wish to have done and say things we wish to have not said. Important: “Look, we all agreed that this would be our mission;
Because the reality is that all families – happy and unhappy, healthy and dysfunctional – occasionally mistaken, the deepest difference between successful and unsuccessful families is not that the successful do not mistake; That is why the successful are constantly finding a way to try again, to return to the right track. For some families, the way they return to the right track is recommending the statement of their family mission and trying to make the adjustments that will restore them to the course. Where the family mission statement plays that central role in a family, becomes the final expression of their “why” in life and functions as their destination (we are going to life together as a family?), Their flight plan (how are we going to get there?) And their compass (if we have given up the course, what should we do to return to our flight plan).
Many ultra -rich clients are concerned that their offspring will come to form attitudes of the right and that such attitudes will undermine their initiative, ambition and achievement. (Of course, we know that many such clients are the educators of those attitudes of law.) I believe that the best way to prevent the formation of such attitudes is to build what I call a culture of family partnership – not partnership in the technical, legal, but partnership in the sense that, as a family, we are in this.