I recently interviewed Stan Miller who is the International Best-Selling Author of “Your American Legacy”. Stan helps people creates powerful strategies that instill lasting values for generations.
Stan sans he loves talking to business owners, because at the end of the day, although I’m a lawyer, I’m really a businessman. That’s what I do. I’m really, really an entrepreneur. But I’ve been an estate planning attorney for a long time. But one of my one of the frustrations that I’ve had, in all the years of my practice, is frequently I would get into conversations, really intense, in-depth conversations with clients, who have shown me a real passionate desire to make an impact on their family in a way so that after they were gone, their children or grandchildren, or great grandchildren would be contributing to and making the world a better place.
Part of my process, Stan says, is to have people spend a little time just identifying the values that are most important to them. And then in the process of that, connecting to the stories in their life, where they derive that life experience from. I tell some of those stories in my book about people that have been influential to me. One of the things I’ll tell you that we’re doing now, my wife and I just moved to a new home, it’s not a brand-new home, but it’s new to us. And we’re in the process now of decorating and one of the things I’m doing is, I’m getting photographs of people that that represent the values that I think really matter.
I’m going to have a picture of my father, up there, I have an uncle that was profoundly influential on the I’m going to put Abraham Lincoln up there. I’m putting Dwight Eisenhower up there. He’s one of my one of my heroes, I’ve got some others, but I’m putting those pictures on the wall so that when one of these days whenever we have grandkids, I want to be able to take the kids in there and ask and have them asking who’s that I see there. And I want to be able to tell the story of why that person’s on my wall. Because I think identifying models, connecting to the stories of what those people did, and why it mattered and what impact it had in the world. It has a profound influence. And particularly if its family members are able to capture those stories and preserve them. So, they’re not lost, and the stories do get lost, and families are dispersed, they move away and are lost forever. And all that value that could have been so powerful and so compelling, is just not accessible. We encourage people to identify the stories, get the written down, get them recorded, so that they’re preserved in a way that can be passed on and can be influential in the lives of people that aren’t even born yet.
Stan says one of the things that he has really become a serious advocate of is, I encourage every family to sit down with to create some version of their own family charity. This is so easy to do. You can go down to the local community foundation, wherever you live, and set up a donor advised fund for really modest amounts of money are no legal fees and setting it up. There are no tax returns to file, it’s there, there. There’s no maintenance in it. But what I love to see families do is to make a contribution, not at death, not when you die, but together as a family.
Sit down at the kitchen table and develop a mission statement, I think it’s a fair question to say to the kids, look, we’ve just made a contribution to our family endowment fund that community foundation. So tonight, we’re going to have a conversation about what this family, our family, what we made to this community, and what kind of impact we want to have on the community and on the world. And invite everybody around the table to weigh in. And to truly engage on that. Build some rituals around these meetings and set it up so that every time you have a teenager, you know, 13 or 14, let them know, a year ahead of time, you’re coming to the next meeting. And you’re going to be expected to come up with ideas about how you want to make the world better, because we have some money here and we’re going to write some checks.
We’re going to send money out to people to do things that make that can make an impact on the world. And we want you involved and engaged in that. I’m just so convinced that that systematic that proactively and systematically engaging in acts of generosity are just the single most powerful tool to positively influence younger generation family members.
Greg Mohr is the Wall Street Journal Best Selling author of “Real Freedom, Why Franchises Are Worth Considering and How They Can Be Used For Building Wealth”, and has managed restaurants, been a micro-electric circuit engineer, owned and operated dry cleaners, storage units, rental properties, and franchises. Greg has helped hundreds of people invest in a few hundred franchise units. Greg is also the podcast host of the Franchise Maven Podcast. Contact Greg at 361-772-6401 or greg@franchisemaven.com