Family Wealth: Keeping It in the Family

Mike0:00Welcome to The Business of Family. I'm your host, Mike Boyd. Multigenerational wealth creation involves so much more than capital accumulation. The most successful families cultivate values, stories, knowledge and resources to pass on to the next generation, and they do it very intentionally. On this show I sit down with members of some of the world's most interesting business families to hear how they do it. To see where your own family stands, take the Business Family Diagnostic at businessoffamily.net.

0:45Today, we're incredibly blessed to have Jay Hughes Jr. as a guest on the podcast. Jay's work was an early inspiration for me to exploring this area for my own family. And he's continued to write a number of books and release content, which is best in the world. I consider Jay's work seminal in the space and so many others who have come since have built upon his work, particularly around the five capitals.

1:11If you've heard us talk about human intellectual and financial capital before, that's Jay who coined those phrases. And when I wrote a wish list at the very beginning of starting this podcast, Jay's name was on that wish list in terms of, you know, wouldn't it be nice to interview these people one day? So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

1:33And I hope you also dig deep in trying to hear the message between the message from someone that's worked in this space for over 50 years and has seen countless families of means succeed and fail in trying to implement these principles. There's so much to learn here. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Jay Hughes Jr., it is an absolute pleasure.

2:00to have you on the podcast. I think when I first started this passion project of mine, your name was on the wish list of people that I would love to interview one day. And here we are. It's quite a treat. So thank you again for joining us. A pleasure to have you here.

Jay2:15Mike, it's my privilege to be with you today and with whoever listens in. And I already know that your gifts to the world have blessed many, including me. And I am deeply privileged to share this time with you and with our listeners.

Mike2:36Oh, thank you. I greatly appreciate that. And certainly your work has shaped my passion for this area. I think that your book, Family Wealth, was one of the first that I ever read in this area and kicked off a deep curiosity and passion to want to follow that trail and see where it's led me. And fast forward, I don't know, a good decade or more, and here we are talking to the man himself. So, Jay, why don't we start there? From how I recall it, the book itself didn't actually start as a published book. I think you had collected some ideas and some wisdom and written it down, and it sort of started being shared around. Is that right? Can you share that

3:19story with us as to how it all came together?

Jay3:19Mike, that's exactly right. I had a major midlife crisis. We can talk about that later if you want to. And realized that what I had been doing in the law and in the journey of the first half of my professional life had one grave deficiency. And that is that I realized that the structures I was creating for clients all over the world, I was the only person who could make them work. And that's a moral failing. The responsibility of a professional is to liberate clients, make them more capable. And I was making them without being aware of it, less capable. So I had to think that through and reconsider how I might go forward.

4:04And as I began to reconsider that question, I began to think about what a family might want to do so that it would be more and more independent, free and liberated, and be able on its own to not only avoid the shirt-sleeved proverb that we'll talk about, I'm sure, later, but more importantly, flourish, which was the great question of all philosophers for families going back to the beginning of writing so historically. So, as I began that process, I began to realize I had some ideas that had begun to come into my consciousness about what a family might do if it chose to avoid that outcome and flourish. And so I began to write them down. And then I

4:54began to talk about them. I must tell you with a great deal of anxiety, it was not things that I felt I had talked about before. So of course, like anybody on a stage with a new play, you're very uncomfortable. But I found through the kindness of the audiences receptivity that I felt I was doing something useful. So as I wrote them down, the book began to emerge.

Mike5:19So you started sharing it with clients first. Maybe we should go back a step. You were working in the law, you were working with generational families, and you started to shift away from just pure legal structures and trusts and things like that to how you could have a greater impact through this work. Is that a fair interpretation?

Jay5:36Yes. Impact is the right word. And if I can put it this way, I realized that the how questions, which are the questions of natural philosophy that had occupied me and were frankly what most lawyers did, having no impact at all, if I can use your word. So I thought that I had to start working with the why questions.

6:00What were the moral philosophy questions of what is true, what is good is beautiful, what relieves suffering, whatever the different paths were that the wise ones who've gone before us, the lineage we're both part of, and many of our listeners are, what did they understood about why? And as I did that, the how questions seemed to be less and less and less important. The structure questions, the means questions, if you will, became just less and less important.

6:29And the larger questions of why, what is purpose, what is meaning, how do we become a flourish, family, or how do we be it, however you like it, just seemed to become far, far more interesting. So here we are today.

Mike6:45And how did this translate into the families that you were working with? Were they receptive to being challenged on the why questions rather than walking in the door and saying, look, we're a family of means. We want to pass this to the next generation, but we want to control how we do it. We want an elaborate trust structure or some other legal means.

7:06And instead, you start a conversation with them about, well, hang on, let's take a step back. Let's talk about the why questions, the purpose, the meeting, the impact. I mean, how did that go? Did you have wonderful clients that were receptive to that? Or was that actually a challenge to try and introduce this conversation to people that have walked through the door looking for legal structures?

Jay7:27Well, of course, it was a challenge. and I think it took my heart, my spirit to engage. Head was fine, but it wasn't the major part of what needed to get engaged. I suppose one could say it was one had to become conscious at some level. And this is what's fascinating, Mike. As soon as I had the confidence to wait clients out, so there's a tendency in the professions to take the client as he appears or she appears and do what they ask. And that's fine. That's useful. It was very clear to me that that wasn't going to take me anywhere or take them anywhere if they really wanted to go on a different journey. So I had to wait them out, which is hard. And I had to ask some gradually

8:16more searching questions that suggested I was interested. And almost immediately, the conversations began to change. And then fairly quickly, not at the very beginning, but as I began to be a little more confident and feel that I could try this, people would look at me funny. Get me funny. Say, are you really interested in that? I'd say, well, yeah, I am.

8:42I'd like to know you better in the sense that other families, I had said, well, have this proverb issue, and they're worried about it, and it's universal, and it's ancient, and it's in the Bible, and they'd say, really? I've heard that profession, that proverb of shirt sleeves, and are you interested in helping me with that? And I'd say, well, are you? And then I wouldn't say yes. I'd say, well, are you interested in my helping you with that? And then everything became possible. Now, I can't say every family had that experience. It didn't. But the families that were curious, Mike, about flourishing, about the outcome of their rising generations, they wanted to engage. The problem was that they didn't have any confidence, not just in me,

9:33but they didn't have confidence that their professional people in all the different professions that are cognate with this work, were really interested in those questions.

Mike9:44They were just running a process. They were just following templates rather than understanding the family.

Jay9:48Yes, they were answering how. As experts, I might say one other thing on this, that I had to learn how to cultivate myself a beginner's mind. The expert in me, and the expert of the first half of my career, was all about being certain that they were going to ask me the question that I had the hammer to hit the nail. The second half of my life is about knowing that I don't have that hammer. I have no idea what a nail looks like. I just have a beginner's mind asking, can I help? And that seems, that's a whole different journey. It just doesn't, expertise doesn't take you on that journey. In fact, I think it stands as an obstacle

10:32to it. Now, I'm not suggesting that deeply understanding the responsibilities of a practice and technique is important, but it doesn't resolve why problems. It doesn't give the client confidence to ask the why questions. So, beginner's mind coming with an open heart and an open mind seems to open up the impact questions.

Mike10:54Jay, I'd love to fast forward now and talk about maybe if you have an example or two about a family that did talk about the why questions, that did follow this thread and were successful in exploring it, what did it look like on the other side? What impact did it have compared to those that just came through the door with how questions? Is there a particular family or families that stand out to you in your mind in terms of how they've embraced this and benefited from it?

Jay11:25Well, I could give you a number of personal examples, but I think I'll give you one that is in the literature, not to avoid being very personal. This is a very personal conversation, and I assure you and our listeners that I honor the confidentiality by which we are conducting this today. So I am an open book. I hope I've already made that clear to people.

11:49I do love the Rockefeller story, Mike, which is the American story. I could also tell the Rothschild story, the European story, and I could tell a Chinese story, but I'll tell the Rockefeller story because I think it's immediately understanding what you're talking about. And let me also say that I've had the distinct honor and privilege of knowing some of the family and later generations of that family and seeing the outcome.

12:16So what is the story? Well, all of us know that John D. Rockefeller sort of founded the oil business in the world. Some people may know that he had some daughters and a son. Some people may know that in those days, which goes back to the end of the 19th and the very beginning of the 20th century, the boys got to do the work.

12:36Thank goodness that's gone. Everybody gets a chance now, but in those days, they didn't. So Junior, as he was called, who had his father's name, as I have my father's name, was in a series of conversations with his father. I put them together as one conversation in Family Wealth, the book you were mentioning, because I thought that one was enough.

12:57And so here's the one conversation. So here's John D. Rockefeller Sr., retired at 50. His son was on the boards of all the companies doing all the business. And the son goes up to this beautiful home on the Hudson River, where I hope some of our listeners someday will go. It's a beautiful place to be and to meditate and to see a family home.

13:17It's a very simple home, by the way. It's big, but it's simple. It's not a palatial home. So Junior, as he's called, sits down with his father and says, Dad, I want to have a conversation with you. Oh, fine, son. What's on your mind? He said, well, Dad, I have a request of you. I would like to leave the family businesses and do something else. His father said, oh, really? Well, what would you like to do? And the son said, Dad, I would like to spend the rest of my life growing a great family, by which he meant flourishing, and doing philanthropy. Now, that's not an uncommon conversation, but here's what's uncommon. His father said, well, then you must do that.

13:57The son said, what? He said, of course you must do that. I did what I loved. You must do what you love. And then comes the second incredibly generative part of the conversation. And the father says, I'm not so good at philanthropy. Would you help me? Whoa! There's the story. And I've been in those conversations. I know what those conversations mean, and they are generative. They take the best energy from this universe and channel it to possibility. And then what did Junior do? Junior did that for the rest of his life. And guess what? He had six children, a daughter and five sons, and they were all useful people.

14:40Now, I'm not suggesting that family, like all families, doesn't have divorce, hasn't had some addictions. Nobody here, please. These are people who put their pants on one leg at a time. But with resources that came from the dream of the first generation, they have done incredible things in the world generation after generation. Is that the kind of story?

15:04Isn't that what we want to imagine for our families?

Mike15:08It sure is. And I think that you touch on some other areas that are key stones to your work, Jay, in that the different forms of capital. And also, I want to get into what you consider wealth to be. I put both of those out there so that you can decide in which order you want to tell us stories.

15:29But I think we could probably spend an hour on those two if we wanted to. But the different forms of capital and the meaning of wealth, where shall we start?

Jay15:38Well, let's start, Mike, with the second, because I think it leads naturally to the first. Wealth in the English language derives from an Anglo-Saxon term, we all, W-E-O-L, we all. And when people say we all, that's interesting. What does that mean? I say, well, have you ever heard of the commonwealth? Oh, or common we all? Oh, yes, I've heard of those.

16:06So wealth derives from well-being. Common wealth, common well-being. Common weal, common well-being. Wealth means well-being. Now, financial capital is a form of wealth. It is not wealth. Wealth is well-being. Now, if we turn to the capitals, what was I trying to do, Mike, as I thought about this and I've been writing about it and working with them almost every day for the rest of my life. I was trying to figure out what the assets of a family are.

16:43I wasn't trying to be a businessman and assets and liabilities, but I thought that's a useful tool. I think lots of different academic disciplines have great ideas in them, one or two that really bear on family flourishing, and I try to find them and pull them out. Well, a balance sheet's a good idea. If you look at it as a humane matter, not a financial matter.

17:05Somebody's listening and saying, oh, that's interesting. Oh, a balance sheet's a humane matter? Yeah, of course it is. So if one then asks oneself, well, what are a family's assets? Well, what I decided was that the first asset a family owns is its spiritual capital. If it doesn't have it, it better develop it. What do I mean by that? I mean, does it have a common purpose?

17:33And is that purpose that every single member of that family, and by affinity, by the way, I don't mean blood. I'll talk about that later if you want, but affinity, positive connection between two people, do they seek to enhance each other's journeys of happiness? That's spiritual capital, would you agree? Then if you have spiritual capital, so you have a common purpose, you have a long journey to make, enhancing this generation, the rising generation, the next rising generation.

18:02Today, you might see four generations in your lifetime committing, compacting together to grow and enhance each other's journey of happiness. That's spiritual capital. Well, then you really need next social capital. And by the way, I'm not meaning philanthropy, although that's very important. What I'm meaning is something very simple but very hard to do. Can you make really good joint decisions linked together over a very long period of time? Now, why joint decisions?

18:35Well, Mike, again, language matters. You can have a single-person household. You cannot have a single-person family. The dictionary doesn't permit it. A family has to be two or more people. As soon as you have two, what happens? You have to make joint decisions. Now, I like, for fun, to remind people that when the mother and the infant are in relationship, the baby makes all the decisions.

19:00That's a family. But it's a joint decision-making system, isn't it?

Mike19:07It is. I think one always wins, though.

Jay19:10Always. Well, or let's say that in that enhancing process of the spiritual capital that's infusing the joint decision-making system, we're seeking to make decisions that accomplish that. And then to have good joint decisions, I believe, you need highly functioning intellectual capital, by which I mean the family has to be a learning system. Now, not just individually learning, but it has to be a system that's sharing what's learned.

19:43So you can sort of see how this works. If we're learning together and we're sharing what we learn, guess what? We're likely to make better joint decisions. We're going to like to be better prepared, better able, and then we're more likely to be enhancing each other's journeys of happiness.

Mike19:58I'm sorry to jump in, but I think so many times intellectual capital is discussed in terms of, let's start an education fund for the children and let's send them all to Harvard or Stanford or whatever it might be. But you make such a great point that in fact, we bring it back to the family unit and we say, how are we learning together? I love that principle.

Jay20:18Yes. And then the fourth element of what I call the qualitative capitals is thriving human capital, thriving human beings. So if you just think away, Mike and our wonderful listeners, to build a system, and I use in my practice a hand gesture. So I'm going to ask all of our listeners to take their right hands and turn their thumbs down so that their four fingers are horizontal and their thumb is the only vertical. And on top, spiritual capital on the pinky. Ring finger, social capital middle finger, intellectual capital, first finger, human capital, and now comes the only quantitative capital, the thumb, financial capital, that is the engine that grows these.

21:11Guess what? Now the financial capital has a purpose too that isn't about accumulation. That's being good steward, but it has a purpose, the engine that grows these. Now, let me just tell you something sad. If a family wants to go out of business fast. The shirt sleeve to shirt sleeve proverb win really fast. All it has to do is turn its hand the other way and have its thumb pointing up, its fingers extended. And guess what? As you wiggle your thumb, your other fingers naturally disappear. A family that's nothing but quantitative capital is toast as a family.

Mike21:46I love that. It's a fantastic, symbolic way of actually visualizing the five capitals.

Jay21:53Yeah. And Mike, when I sit in meetings with wonderful families that privilege me to come, and since I'll be 80 next year, there are not many of them, they're smart enough to realize you don't want your advisor to be nearly 80 years old. Talk about a wasting asset. But when I do have the privilege to sit with them and watch them and talk with them, sometimes, and people do that, they sort of begin to get talking just about the quantitative capital.

22:25And the meetings start to get not so good. And all I do is I stick my thumb up and I wiggle it. And then I turn my hand upside down. And everybody says, oh no, oh no. And I don't say anything. The meeting moves back to growing those qualitative capitals, Those assets, the real assets, supported by the quantitative capital.

22:52And now, again, I want to say it a second time on purpose. Now you've purposed the quantitative capital. It doesn't have the ingredients that so many of our friends say, oh, how much is enough? Or, oh, I don't want to have entitled children. Of course you don't want to have entitled children. And of course you must decide how much is enough.

23:13But I can say this, you don't have entitled children and you will know how much is enough if you're concentrating on growing your qualitative capitals.

Mike23:23The qualitative capitals, these other four fingers, is there a measuring stick for success in that or is it individual to every family? I imagine every family circumstance is unique and they would decide for themselves that jointly, if they're doing it correctly, what success looks like. Is that how you see it as well? Or are there sort of some key benchmarks in terms of what great human capital looks like as a minimum?

Jay23:45It is unique. And at the same time, because of particularly positive psychology and the work of Carl Jung, there are now, Mike, in the world, assessment organisms for a family that is really thoughtful to be able annually to assess the states of its capital. Our field has really begun to take in the wonderful things from industrial psychology that are tools that businesses use all the time and apply them now to families. So families can assess and answer the question, how are we doing? To answer it in a slightly different way, so you see, I still do care about how. Even though I'm most interested in why, I also understand that if you get the whys right, you need hows then.

24:36So that's a how. But let me answer the question more from a why perspective. Sigmund Freud, when he was late in his practice, made an observation that has been hugely helpful to me in answering the question you posed. He said the most adjusted people he had met. I'd like our listeners to substitute adjusted, put in the word happiest.

25:02happiness. So, happiness leads to flourishing. Would you agree that's an equation? Okay. So, what Freud said was this. He said the most adjusted, I'll say the people who achieved happiness, in his opinion, were those who learned to love and learned to work as vocation, vocare, the Latin calling, not labore labor. I'm not suggesting that bringing your vocation to Life doesn't require sweat equity, labore.

25:32It does. But vocare is what he's talking about. What is my calling in this lifetime? So to love and to work, he said, led to adjustment. I call it to happiness. And then he said something remarkable. He said the two great impositions or obstacles to adjustment for human beings were sex, and he meant by that both biological sex and gender, and he said, and money, and he said, money is the worst of all because no nice person will speak of it.

26:04He was absolutely right.

Mike26:07It's so telling. And why I started this podcast, Jay, because as a young person coming into means, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and no one who had means would talk to me about it.

Jay26:20That's right. Now, what are we doing today? We're fulfilling your dream, Mike, because we are talking about it. We're not tongue-tied. Now, if I'm sitting talking to my children, I'm not tongue-tied either because I heard Freud. When you ask me about those families that I help, and we talk about growing the qualitative capitals and purposing the quantitative capital, I can assure you they are not talking to their children and grandchildren about money well either.

26:48But we take Freud as a truth. We don't debate him. We take him as true on this. Freud was a pioneer. Jung had to come along and fix it up. Well, that happens. That's okay. Freud got this one right. Would you agree?

Mike27:01I would agree. Absolutely.

Jay27:03So when people ask me, as you said, well, what about the qualitative? How do we look at it? I'm going to, I always ask that question. I say, well, how are we doing with learning, learning to love? Remember, Freud didn't say loving, learning to love, which includes forgiveness, by the way. It includes the different forms of love. This is serious and complex matter.

27:28And then that avocational question. And Mike, you won't be surprised in Australia that about, I got a lot of grandfathers around the world who said they didn't want one of their children's vocation to be surfing. They were trying to get me. They were trying to catch me, Mike. They said, Mr. Hughes, you can't mean that. And I said, well, now hang on. I said, suppose your granddaughter came to you and said, Grandpa, my vocation is to be a surfer. And you were about to tear her apart and be furious. I said, hang on. Suppose you said to her, really? What would you do about it? And these men get really quiet. They look at me or these old women, they look at

28:07me. Uh-oh. What's Jay about to say? Because they trust me. I think that's fair. I wouldn't have this conversation the first meeting, but they trust me. And I said, and then suppose your granddaughter says, well, grandpa, I understand. What I mean by being a surfer is my vocation is I want to win the gold medal at Waikiki or on Bondi Beach or wherever those huge waves are.

28:30And now grandpa says, what? Yeah, I want to win the gold medal. Well, what would you do? Well, I have to get up at five o'clock in the morning almost every year for the next two or three years. I have to find a coach and I have to practice. And now those men and women that said they didn't on of a surfer say, Mr. Hughes, you're not fair. You're unfair. But I get your point, because that vocation means that, doesn't it? It's a dream that has to manifest.

28:59And then, Mike, I say one other thing to them, and they laugh with me. And often, these are people that have had amazing lives, and they have been apparently, in the world's terms, quantitatively very successful. And then I ask them a couple of questions, and often we have tears over this, which we enjoy together. And I say, by the way, do you think anybody in the world knows that the result of that quantity is early dream you had? And they look at me, I said, yeah.

29:29And I bet it didn't work out so well right away. No, it didn't. I bet you even had mentors. And then they tell me about their mentors. And we reminisced together. And I said, so the dream takes a while to manifest, doesn't it? Because you have to hold onto it. And if it manifests, you have to shepherd it.

29:49And all of a sudden, Mike, the most wonderful stories come, not of success, but of the actual journey of a life to bring the aspiration of a dream. Feel these words for a moment. A dream's an aspiration. And then be inspired by your own dream, captured by it. And then in that inspired place of the dream coming, you perspire like crazy.

30:13and maybe it manifests. Well, all of a sudden, we're looking at these qualitative journeys of love and work, sex and money, but we're looking at it in the path that human beings live to bring great dreams to life. They're inspired by them, our own dreams, and then they perspire. But first, there has to be aspiration and someone, I bet in your life too, heard your aspiration and heard it differently. You might have said it to 20 people, but someone said, Mike, what will you do about that? And then you thought, gosh, wow, somebody not only listened, but that's a really good question. Is it so important to me that it is inspiring me?

31:01Now, that was a roundabout, but that's how I look at how you figure these things out, how you assess, how you ask the questions, how you discover the stories. Apologies for the length, but it'll give you an idea of how hard it is to have an answer and yet some of the means.

Mike31:19Please don't apologize for the length, Jay. I want to go on all of the tangents and hear all of the stories. I hope you've cleared the day. I love hearing these. And I wish we were doing this in person too, because I'm actually here on summer holidays in Australia with my kids at the moment. I'm at one of the beautiful surf breaks, Noosa, in Queensland. And I can see some of those grandchildren out the window pursuing their vocation on the waves at the moment. So it would be a beautiful setting for this conversation, I think.

Jay31:48That's my loss. I'd love to be right there with you too. Go ahead.

Mike31:53I think this is a great segue into talking about the rising generation and beneficiaries. You've just given us this beautiful platform for these conversations about encouraging beneficiaries to actually pursue their vocation as well. But you have a fascinating concept called the ghost liability on a family's balance sheet. I'd love for you to elaborate that for us because it's not something that I had heard of before.

32:20And I think it's a great idea that needs a little bit more light shed on it.

Jay32:25Mike, thank you. Again, using business techniques for why questions, we've explored together, I think, very thoroughly for people, the asset side of their family balance sheets. One cannot ever then, being adult persons, recognize that there are not liabilities. There are obvious liabilities, illness, deficiency, external sequestrations. I'm not making light of these. There are obvious liabilities. It's been my experience, by the way, and just again, the families that are listening and think about this, that if the major obstacle, I don't like liabilities, I like obstacles.

33:04If the major obstacles in their current circumstances have to do with lack of that social capital, the ability to make good joint decisions, or lack of one of those major human qualities, then that obstacle is the one they'll work on. While they're working on that, they can't be prioritizing quite the same way what's happening externally. They get that internal right in a generation rising. I can promise you the next rising generation will inherit that getting that right, and their problem will be external. You're going to have to deal with something that's coming at them from externalities. So one of the liability questions is, well, what's our big obstacle?

33:45Is our big obstacle internal? Is our big obstacle external? And as you begin to look at that, and particularly when the obstacles are internal, and by the way, they're always internal and external. I'm just saying which ones tend to be in a particular generation the largest priority. When you look at the internal obstacles, the tendency is to assume that the people in the room are the obstacles. I just want to tell our audience categorically they aren't the only people in the room. Every family has ghosts. Now, some are good ghosts, like Casper the ghosts.

34:22They're friendly ghosts. And we call them up at almost every meeting with stories. The problem is what the Buddhists call hungry ghosts, ones whose goals in their own lives were unfulfilled and whose problems linger on and they're unrecognized. They're in the room. In the Asian context, and I very much want to include our Asian friends in this conversation this way. Asians understand profoundly, if they are Confucian, I would say less Hindu and India Indians, but still there too, but the Confucian principles understand face profoundly. If you take a man or woman's face, you make them a ghost, and they will never leave. It's a profound act, and one that must be taken with incredible care.

35:18Because when you make a ghost, you have to live with that ghost. The ghost doesn't go away. Even if they're taken in their face, they leave permanently. They never left. Other kinds of ghosts are stories that are untrue, but told as if they're true. And everybody knows that the people in the stories weren't the way the story's being told.

35:41That's a ghost. So ghosts come in many flavors. Now there's one other kind of ghost, Mike, that we talked about together that is a very odd ghost, but comes again from the beginning of my conversation tonight with our listeners. This is going to surprise many, many people. Almost always the plan that they have for transition, I don't like the word succession, for transition is a liability, the plan itself. The structure in which the family finds itself is actually a liability.

36:17People are saying, oh, come on, what's he talking about? Well, trusts, partnerships, holding companies, all the different structures that are created. Here's the problem. They're created for a time and place and almost always to deal with creditor liability risk and taxes. and then unfortunately very often monuments to family members and i was asked people well and i'm just put throw this out for people who like poetry read the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley called Ozymandias i'm not going to say more about it but read the poem so almost always the structure says we're going to deal with the creditors we're going to deal with the taxes and maybe we're going to deal with a monument. But guess what? I didn't say. I didn't say anything about the capacity

37:06of the people who will be living in that plan to have been considered when the plan was created. Not one. Now, in the first half of my life, I was guilty, guilty, guilty. I'm not giving a testimonial. That's a fact. The plans were magnificent. The problem was the family patients died because they couldn't live in the plan. They were disenabled by the plan. Rather than made more free, more liberated by the plant. So for people who want to try to concretize what I'm talking about, and in a very powerfully positive way of understanding that liability, this is what I would suggest. I happen to love seafood, and I particularly love crab. And I can tell our

37:48Australian friends that the best crab I ever had was one night in Sydney from Tasmania that was as big as a huge roasting pan. It was enormous. It took me an hour to eat it with a great bottle of Australian white wine. And you're still telling the story about it. I can't stop. Okay. So here's the problem. If the plan is a liability, and by that I mean it's hidden. It's a ghost because nobody thinks about the plan as a living organic thing. It is. And you discover that it's organic and living when you can't live in it. It's too small. It didn't include you. It didn't ask you as a beneficiary, if it's a trust plan, is this trust going to enhance your life? It didn't ask

38:34that question. It didn't ask, are the trustees going to spend more than half of their time with you on what enhances your life, not on the investments in the administration. But of course, they think they're going to spend 90% of their time on administration and investment. Well, that's a plan that can't work. That's a liability. So here's my crab problem. The crab problem is that the plan itself is not deficient. The problem is the plan didn't imagine joint decision-making.

39:05The plan is too small. The crab shell is too small. The problem for the family to manage that liability is to understand the biology of a crab and the evolution of a crab. And everybody's saying, I see what he's going to say. He's going to say that the crab can't get from a small shell to a big shell that's a plan that will work and becomes an asset. Can't do that. First, you have to shed the shell. You have to go through the soft shell process of fragility and risk to grow the larger shell that you need for the shell to become an asset until, Mike, for a rising generation, it's too small again. Great families, generation after generation,

39:47use the biology of a crab as their special sauce. And here's the key. If you're growing those four qualitative capitals, then during the period of fragility, you're learning how to grow those capitals like crazy. So when you grow the bigger shell, the plan supports growing those because that too small shell never considered them. That's why it's a liability.

Mike40:13And so many families go through that soft shell period, that period of fragility, as you say, and don't actually make it to the larger shell. That's where it breaks down, that period of risk.

Jay40:23And that is in part because they are not given the gift that you're giving tonight, not Jay Hughes, Mike Boyd is giving to your listeners to ask them to recognize that if all they do is inherit a shell that's too small, the fragile period will kill them. If they can see that that shell is too small, shed it and use that period of soft shell to learn how to grow their qualitative capitals, then without understanding it, they'll be growing the larger shell at the same time.

40:57And then, by the way, they'll become anti-fragile. One of my modern heroes is Nassim Taleb, who many of our listeners will know as the man who wrote a book about black swans. Interesting book. But Taleb considers himself a philosopher, not an investor. And he believes that his book, Anti-Fragile, is his great book. And he asks the question there, is resilience your goal or endurance? Oh, is that a wonderful question? Oh, way too much time, I think, is spent on saying we need to be resilient. That's good. But the real question is we need to be enduring. And that's that bigger shell. So again, it's rather lengthy, but the ghosts, recognizing them, exercising them, not exercising, exorcising them,

41:48exercising them makes them just awful. You need to exorcise them. And you need to recognize them and treat them properly, whether they're human ghosts in a certain sense, or they are structural ghosts. But you can't leave them. And I like to say to people when they say, oh, Jay, that's a lot of words. Oh, gosh, how do I think about that? I say, well, did you ever as a child read the story of Rapunzel? And they say, Rapunzel, wasn't she the woman who had long hair? Yes, she was.

42:24She was a woman with long hair. So what does that have to do with these ghost problems? I say, oh, you might recall that at the very beginning of the story, it's a wedding. And the king and queen have invited many, many people to come to the wedding. Oh, yeah, I remember something about that. Ah, do you remember there's one they didn't invite?

42:44Oh, wait a minute. Hmm. And you remember she crashed the wedding, the witch? Oh, yes, I do remember that story. And what did she do? She put them all to sleep for 100 years. Notice the ghosts. Welcome the ghosts and let them get on with their life. But you leave them alone, they will come to the wedding. They will haunt the wedding.

Mike43:09Great storytelling, Jay. Thank you. You've also mentioned something to me along the lines of preparing beneficiaries, preparing the rising generation is something that's often neglected. And that particularly when we're talking about structures and trusts and things like that, that they often get a cursory glance as to who's actually going to live in the plan and see it through. How do you see, is it the most appropriate way to prepare beneficiaries and include them in a plan the right way?

Jay43:41Mike, I think the first thing we want our listeners to understand is that at some point, there will be a great reveal. At some point, that beneficiary or part limited partner or share whatever it will be, is going to discover that he or she has had a role in a play that they did not sign up for. That's the first deeply conscious and caring thing we must understand. So there will be a great reveal. And on that day of that great reveal, that person who we love profoundly is going to be shocked. I call this receiving a meteor from outer space.

44:22Regardless of what role in the play they have, the role they have in the play is they're receiving a meteor from outer space. They suddenly discover that for the rest of their lives, It's a life sentence. They're going to have to play roles someone cast for them in a play they didn't sign up for. Now, I suppose some of our Buddhist friends might say, well, they did sign up for it because they chose those parents to learn something from them.

44:46Yes, that's true. I actually think the Buddhists are right about that. And by the way, if people want to quiet their children down, just say, look, you chose me. That'll fix it. They get about 15 minutes of silence. But moving on from that, this person we love and we cherish is because of us or some earlier generation going to receive a meteor from outer space.

45:10It probably has nothing to do with their dream. It has nothing to do with their learning to love and their learning to work or how they deal with sex and money. But it certainly has to do with money. No nice person can speak. So the great reveal is almost always a disaster. And it's a disaster because even though the person with the greatest of care in preparing for that great reveal still knows that the person listening will tune out the moment they find out that they have a meteor.

45:41They tune out. Of course they tune out, just like anybody else hit with a meteor or the equivalent. So they're really rest of sad and all the preparations meaningless. So the first thing we have to do is to be incredibly caring, deeply understanding that this meteor from outer space has something in it. What's in it? Well, one of the books I wrote called The Cycle of the Gift asks the profound why question.

46:08Why a meteor? Well, we have these resources. And then comes the question, is it a gift or a transfer? What's in your meteor? Has your meteor got love in it? Lots of love? Is it designed as much as you can to be able to be absorbed and incorporated as a gift of love? Or is it a transfer?

46:28Now, by the way, gifts are very hard to make. Transfers are easy. Love is hard. Transfer is easy. That first thinking before the great reveal is critical. What's in the meteor? Now, Mike, just so that nobody thinks we're naive, sometimes what was in that meteor for the person who's now the intermediary generation, who's the parent that was a grandparent and now the child beneficiary or partner, has a great reveal, knows that the remedier they received was full of transfer, full of obligation, full of duty. It wasn't any love. It was part of a plan, a plan that dealt with creditors. They'd have creditors and they wouldn't have to pay.

47:09They'd have taxes. You don't have to pay. You have a monument to me. Oh, dear. So now the parent has to be alchemist. The parent has to take the lead of the meteor and turn it into gold. The parent has to lie like crazy. Lie like crazy. White lies. The lawyer who's doing the great reveal or the psychologist or the parent has to lie like crazy in the right sense.

47:31And even the beneficiary who's receiving the reveal knows it's a lie, but it's okay. because it's changing lead into gold. It's changing a pure transfer of obligation into a gift. Now, the second thing I think we need to understand about this is once the meteor has hit, all of a sudden, what to most of the world looks like a blessing has enormous burden associated with it. Part of the love of that gift is the recognition of the burden. Now, not that this money will destroy my child. That's fine. That's a perfectly fine emotion. Maybe true. Well, even if it might be true, then what can we do to make sure it isn't true? And ignoring it or not talking

48:14about money is not going to achieve that. Gradually, as that child becomes more and more competent, the work of my friend Joline Godfrey on raising financially fit kids is a great way to start thinking early about what are the kinds of things that the child needs to know to learn themselves about what financial resources mean to them. By the way, all the way back to where we started, the key is that they understand it's to grow their human self, that they've learned that all along. They've had investments made in them as gifts of love that are encouraging, or dare I say, enhancing, which is an even higher order of why question, isn't it? Absolutely. Well, if that's

48:57been your process, then there's still going to be a great reveal. There's still going to be shock. there's still going to be an awareness that I'm written into a play I didn't sign up for. There's still going to be the responsibility to incorporate that meteor, lifetime responsibility, but you've moved the odds. Then I would say there's one more thing. Preparing is, in my view, preparing first for the great reveal and then being very certain that after the great reveal, there's a period of calm. Let me tell you what no one should ever do again, which used to happen routinely. After the great reveal was made, the stupid person would say, and by the way, you never have to work. This is a disaster in Freudian terms, because work is critical

49:51in the vocational context. It's the stupidest and most dangerous thing anybody could say. It destroys one of the pillars that a human being needs to meet development, happiness. So the important thing after the great reveal is that there's a period of calm for this person who suddenly has received a meteor to begin to imagine, well, what does it mean to live with this?

50:16Sometimes now, when this is handled badly, it even gets to a kind of post-traumatic shock. I don't want to diagnose here. I'm not a psychologist, but I have seen these behaviors. I've seen people fight it, which means they try to spend it. I've seen them flee from it, try to give it away. And what have I seen most of the time? Just like all of PTSD, they freeze. They are frozen for the rest of their lives. Their cells freeze the bad energy of that meteor. And then there are nice people for the rest of their lives living in nice houses with nice cars like Stepford Wives. You see them at the country club and they're nice people.

50:54There's nothing home. They're frozen cellularly by that extraordinary event. Who does best? The people who do best are the post-traumatic growth. That is, they recognize the meteors come and they say, I need some time. I don't need tasks. I need time to explore this event. And then as I begin to be capable of exploring it, I need you now to come with me. By the way, you don't get off by the great reveal and then go, wait, no, no. If you're going to be the person, then you're agreeing to stick with me while we discover a world I didn't know anything about. And you don't either because it's my world, it's not yours, even if you think you know. You're going through that soft shell

51:38process as a crab. Have to. That's the problem of receipt of someone else's dream. By the way, so that nobody's misunderstanding. There's no such thing as financial resources. They're only things that are the representation of someone else's dream. Anybody who doesn't get that right just misses the problem of the recipient. You're not receiving money. You're receiving the consequences of someone's dream, the manifestation, right? Absolutely, yes.

52:08And by the way, since you can't know another person's dream, you can't, no matter how hard they try to explain it to you. You simply have to understand that your answer is now, how do you integrate it with your dream? So, a real gift is not a gift of the story of some huge Alzamandian character's dream. It's how can this dream and the journey of that dream, the manifestation and the creation, you bring you, rising generation person, a chance to experience the same process, dream, aspire, inspire, perspire. You're on your own journey.

Mike52:50And Jay, when you refer to this great reveal, are we to interpret that as the actual act of inheritance or receiving a gift or some major event? Or is it also the great reveal of the plan? Could it simply be we're revealing what our intentions are for the rising generation or the beneficiaries, or here's what you'll receive?

53:13And it also has this grand impact on influencing the lives of those who are receiving it.

Jay53:20Mike, all of those. It is all of those, and in the ordered way that you stated them. The key is one's intention, and that is a consciousness question. It's not, I'm going to write a memo and hand it to you to read. It's, what am I consciously intending? Am I intending to make a gift, or am I intending to make a transfer? And by the way, there are perfectly harmless transfers. Again, what's the intention? What am I seeking to convey? That's the key.

53:57And by the way, if my behavior has not been consistent, I'm sorry to say this in a way, if my behavior to you has not been consistent in the past, then I had better really seriously consider my intention now. Because once it's done, it's done. And if I am not absolutely consistent from there, no good will come.

54:20That's really important. So what's my intention? because that intention is what I have to be consistent with ever after, don't I?

Mike54:29Jay, when you're referring to a transfer versus a gift, are you implying that they're transferring their dream to the beneficiary or transferring responsibility for something rather than a gift? Can you elaborate on that for me, please?

Jay54:43If I truly love you, then I will deeply consider, will I harm you? So I must know you deeply before I send you a meteor. And I must do all I can to put love in it. That doesn't mean I will succeed, but it means that I have deeply considered the question of harm, and I've deeply considered the question of love.

55:03And then I'm acting to free you, to liberate you. That's all I want from you. And I don't know how you're going to do it. I can't know that. It's not given to me to know that. I simply act to you with that intention. The moment I start putting strings on, it's a transfer. Aristotle said something that I would love our listeners to hear.

55:27He said that he thought he was the first person in literature I know who said it's reasonably easy to make a fortune, impossible to give one away well. He then went on to say that one of the virtues, not values, one of the virtues like courage and justice and empathy and interconnectedness of whether Eastern or Western virtues, he said one of the virtues is magnificence, which is what a gift has to be.

55:50To be a gifted has to be magnificent. What did he mean by this? He meant it had to be a consequence of magnanimity. I'm going to say it again. A consequence of magnanimity, big-heartedness. That's a gift. Anything else is a transfer. Again, I'm not saying all transfers are harmful, but I'm saying you grade down. If I'm giving you a big-hearted gift, a magnanimous action. My only expectation for you is joy and the hope it liberates you. However, you, as the recipient, define that. The moment I have ambition for you or expectation for you, I'm in trouble. That's those strings attached. Right. Now, I'm not saying that gifts happen very often, but I am saying that being a conscious person, understanding the risks of entitlement,

56:43Understanding all of the things that parents are rightly worried about and see around in their communities all the time are worth worrying about. The question of one's intention, however, is not only will I not intentionally create that problem, but I will intentionally seek to try to find a way to send love that in some way enhances your life in such a way that you achieve greater liberation or happiness.

57:15I think happiness is liberation in a profoundly conscious way. This is hard stuff, Mike. this is hard stuff. I hope there's no one who's hearing me say that I don't think this is hard stuff or that I haven't made mistakes. I'm speaking out of my own experience and the experience of thousands of others that I've observed. I do think it's possible, provided that we are as conscious as we can be, that we're seeking to make a gift of love. So we're going to put something in a meteor. It's going to go to the other person. They have to incorporate it, And we can't know the outcome, but we can do everything we can intentionally that they

57:56have the greatest chance. That makes sense?

Mike57:58It absolutely does. Jay, I'd love to get your perspective on a different angle of this, if I may. Imagine you're an entrepreneur, a founding generation, or perhaps an early second gen, and you're listening to this podcast today, and you're saying, how does this apply to me? How do I lay the foundation of a family enterprise or the beginnings of generational wealth with the five capitals?

58:25Where is the starting line? How do we move from zero to one? Because there's so much to unpack here. Where do people start?

Jay58:34Well, first of all, my father, who was my great teacher, said to me, Mike, a long time ago, where's the beginning? And I thought, what is he talking about? It's kind of Yoda-like. He didn't know anything about Yoda. I don't know if he ever even saw it. I guess he may have seen some Star Wars, but he was a Yoda-like man.

58:53And I thought, what's he talking about? He said, Jay, let me be clear. When you enter a picture or somebody begins to think, Mike, about this question, that's not the beginning. Almost always the beginning is down the road. So the way I answer this question when I'm asked it, and I'm asked it frequently, is to say, first of all, to the person questioning, you can't know the beginning yet. The journey hasn't begun yet. You're in preparation. You're in that place where the cells are trying to evolve to create something. So how do you get cells strong? So when they begin to merge into this thing called a family, you already have some pretty strong qualitative capital. Well, just here are a couple of suggestions for people to think

59:39about how to get to the beginning. It astonishes me, Mike, that many families with huge resources have never studied the fact that human beings don't learn the same way. They say, oh, gee, that's so simple. No, they don't know that. They don't have doctorates in education, nor do I. And strangely as it may seem, they don't know that modern science enables every human being to know how he or she learns. And they said, well, that's an interesting idea. Wow. Oh, you must be trying to find out where our deficiencies are, Mr. Hughes. I said, no, no, I'm not. I'm sure those will show up, but what I'm interested in is this. If we're going to be thriving human capital and we don't know how we learn, we've just set up and we can find out,

1:00:32then we just failed the intellectual capital exercise. We just failed. If on the other hand, we can in four hours with an expert from six years old up, find out how we learn, well, why wouldn't we want to know that? Not only for our family wellbeing and journey when we start out on the road, but for every day that the child's in school or adult courses. That's an interesting idea. And I said, oh, by the way, the trustees have to do it too. What? Yeah, they're family members. What? Well, I said, if they're not family members, fire them. What?

1:01:05I like that. I said, well, you're about to create, you have all these trusts and these kids are eventually going to be beneficiaries. You don't think the trustees should know how they learn so that they can enhance their lives? Oh, I don't think I have the right trustees. Ah, that's a different question. But you can't have a family system that includes that plan we were talking about before the bigger shell if all the people in the system aren't in the room.

1:01:33And you got ghost trustees, coming back to something we talked about. You don't have trustees, you got ghosts. So you get rid of the room. So everybody learns how they learn. Oh, this is interesting. Now, when we actually start the journey to become a flourishing family, haven't started yet, we're getting ready. When we get out on the road, we know whose skill we need.

1:01:54And we also know that if we ask something, we need to ask different ways. We need to ask this one, what do you see? And this one, what do you feel? Oh, now we have a really powerful tool, don't we? And by the way, when we get to social capital and we're making joint decisions together, don't you think we'd like to know that each of the person in that joint got the material, same one we did, but the way he or she best absorbs it?

1:02:23If this one likes words and this likes numbers and this likes pictures, wouldn't the humane thing for our joint decision-making and our well-being, our social spiritual capital to get to a good purpose, wouldn't it make a difference if everybody got the material the way he or she best absorbed it? Oh, we could do that? I said, well, why not?

1:02:45What are your resources for? Oh, that's really interesting. And then let's just take another example. There are numbers of days, but we'll take one more. I love the Enneagram. What's Enneagram? Okay. Enneagram is a tool, probably 2,000, maybe years or more old. Every couples therapist in the world is any good, studies Enneagram. Enneagram is nine pointed star, flat horizontal star. Each of the points is one of nine personality types. Oh, come on. That's just sophistry. That's stupid. No. If something's a couple thousand years old and millions of people have used it to their benefit, you're just going to throw it out?

1:03:25Oh, okay. Keep talking. I think it sounds woolly to me. I said, well, you can. But I said, suppose for a moment that there are, let's say, 10 of you in the system, parents, children, grandchildren, and some trustees, maybe some key executives in the business. I don't know. And I said, suppose that you're in the process of communication.

1:03:48Uh-oh, we're back to that joint decision-making, aren't we? Yeah, uh-huh. We're preparing for the journey. Okay, I remember that. Okay. So here's the problem. This person over here, you told me before the meeting, is really a jerk. And you just don't understand them. I said, yeah, okay. I said, but let me just tell you right now, I've talked to that person, and guess what?

1:04:11Oh, really? Yep. Oh, dear. You think both of you are right? Oh, dear. Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I said, well, suppose you could answer 120 questions with a really good Enneagram facilitator. They're all over the world, by the way. It's not hard to find. And he or she could point out that you, sir, are an eight. That means you're a boss type. That's not bad. It's your boss type. And this person is a nine who's interested in harmony. How do you think you communicate?

1:04:48We don't, what do you mean? It's a jerk. I said, hang on, let's start over again. You see Mr. Eight black and white. Mr. Nine sees gray. Really? Yeah. You just took the test together. Remember, you did the Enneagram test and he's a nine and you're an eight. Oh, he only sees gray? Yeah, various shades of gray. Well, that's crazy. It's only black and white. And the nine says, no, it's not. My point, Mike, so when I finish the storytelling is the Enneagram works.

1:05:20And if all the people who are going on in that journey know the personality type of each other, then they will know where the skills are and that each of those types where they're at their best they'll also know when that person is at his or her worst because the journey's hard and they won't condemn them because that's the the normal material behavior of somebody who's distressed not with them but distressed because it's scary well i could go on and on and i'm not going to My point is that the whole field of assessment tools is so rich for families.

1:05:59They just don't use them. I'll tell you what drives me crazy is they use them in their businesses and they don't use them at home. And then when you suggest them using them at home, they say, well, that's just woolly. You're just being woolly. You're being fuzzy. I say, but you're using that in your business. Well, that's business.

Mike1:06:15You see it all too often, don't you? what works in the corporate enterprise doesn't translate or should translate, but does not get translated into the family enterprise.

Jay1:06:24Yeah. So what I'm really saying, and to answer your question is, my father's wisdom about where's the beginning is you don't just start. You start by building up those cells that are going to make up the team on the journey. You learn about each other. You know, four guys that are going to climb Everest don't arrive at the base camp never having climbed a mountain, do they?

1:06:46No. And the four that get there didn't meet for the first time at base camp. No, they prepared. And the preparation is learning about each other in true depth with really useful things that other people have done. And then, and this is very, very important, in my father's wisdom about where the beginning is, you then get to the great, great statement of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who's my great hero.

1:07:14And he was asked, how do you make a long, long journey? And he said, it is the first step. Well, I'm simply saying to people, don't take that first step until you've done all that preparation. Then that first step is really conscious, isn't it?

Mike1:07:33It is, Jay. Everyone's stepping. Everyone's making that first step together.

Jay1:07:39That isn't subtle. It's profound.

Mike1:07:42It absolutely is. And of course, it's also very obvious what you didn't talk about in laying the foundation for a generational family enterprise. You didn't talk about financial capital. You didn't talk about trust structures. You didn't talk about wills and inheritance and any of that. You talked about the other forms of capital, which I think is very telling after how many years in this profession. So we can learn a lot from that. Jay, on that note of taking a very long journey, I'm curious to hear about your perspective of generational storytelling, something I'm particularly passionate about. I love talking to people about it on the podcast.

1:08:23I think that it's a powerful tool, but I'm curious whether or not you've used it or encourage families to document their history, tell their stories, trials, tribulations, so that the next generation, the rising generation, not only know about their family's history, but can hopefully benefit from some of that storytelling.

Jay1:08:44Mike, there's a technique that I use, and technique is a big word for something much simpler. Many, many years ago, I was in a conversation with my father, another one with him, when my first granddaughter was born. Her name is Margaret. And Margaret was born 25 years ago. So I called my dad and this was his, I'm the eldest in my family in a generation. She's the eldest of her generation. Her mother is the eldest of her generation. So I called my father and I said, dad, you have your first great grandchild. Oh, I said, that's wonderful. Her name is Margaret and she's fine. And her mother Ellen is fine. I said, dad, you know, I had a

1:09:26very strange thought this morning. I said, well, what's that? So I said, I think I'm going to tell Margaret when she's old enough that I knew my great-grandmother. He said, that's right, you did. And I said, I'm going to tell her that I knew a woman, well, my great-grandmother, who was born before the American Civil War. He said, that's right, she was. She was born in 1857, and the Civil War began in 1861. I said, yeah. I sat next to her on Sunday mornings in New York City. She was 90 years old cooking the Sunday supper. And she told me what it was like to be a girl in Missouri before the Civil War, what happened when the armies went through their farm, why her father

1:10:10was almost shot but then wasn't, and why, and all these stories. So I said, I'm going to tell her that story. And then my father, who was almost always topped me if he could, that was part of our competition, he said, Jay, I was thinking the same thing. And I'm going to tell her, which he did, that I knew my great-grandmother who was born before Napoleon died.

1:10:31Now, on that conversation, Mike, we went back to 1820 when his great-grandmother was born and Napoleon was alive. And we carried the stream of our simple family all the way to Margaret who was born in 1995 and who will live almost certainly into the 22nd century. So storytelling for families isn't only the joy of the story. It helps understand time.

1:10:57There's a wonderful principle for families. Hasten slowly. This is wisdom of the Greeks, of the Romans, and of our time. Hasten slowly. Only families, Mike, can run through that time if they give themselves the storytelling to remember. And that process of hastening our whole story slows down the realization that we have, if we've got 150 years that we can recover in 10 minutes or 20 minutes, then the next 100 years becomes easy.

1:11:30We're not starting at one or zero. No, we're starting in a lineage, not a legacy, a lineage, a long line of that story. So storytelling is incredibly important to discover our history. The technique I would suggest to people, and it's very simple and very powerful, is when they're having their reunions, or I encourage them to have a reunion, it's good to find a round table if you can.

1:12:01It's much better than a square one or a rectangle one. Everybody around that round table. And start with the youngest. And I think six years old is fine. and you ask the youngest this question, who was the oldest person you knew and what did they tell you about somebody older? And that's the only question. And you move around that table all the way to the eldest.

1:12:23And that's the one question. And that family will discover in that process, its lineage. It will have its history. It will know. And then there's a piece to this that's very subtle. And I don't usually tell this purposefully, but I'm going to tell our audience a secret. If you want the married-ins to weave into your tapestry, to be positively attracted, you have to give them a chance to tell their story.

1:12:49And their story will be about people that nobody in the room knows. But now think about how much richer the tapestry becomes. Because they tell about their story. And now you can feel the positive connections, positive energy. Now we're weaving. Now the mosaic is getting much more interesting. And all of a sudden, the married-ins, quote-unquote, become a part of that tapestry because their story is now present.

1:13:17We know their story. And also, what's fascinating about this is that if you do it every couple of years, not necessarily every year, although people may want it every year, then do it every year, but you do it every couple of years, the amazing thing is that very often you hear the same story and equally often you hear a new story.

1:13:36Somebody thinks of something they didn't think of the last time. Storytelling is absolutely critical. And I want to just finish this answer with a slightly different but part of the storytime. Many years ago, I was studying the anthropology of an American Indian tribe called the Iroquois. I would guess that in each of the countries that our listeners are, there would be a similar story.

1:14:04The Iroquois are a tribe of American Indians that are about 600 years old. They have a Genesis story, like all tribes do. They have an evolutionary story, like all tribes do. They are the amalgamation of five tribes, and then six joined about 300 years ago. So they are a series of tribes that created a federal system, confederal, that they make their own decisions on many things, federal when they need to.

1:14:34When they have a federal meeting, all the tribes, to consider important issues, the elder of the tribe, male or female, whatever the elder is, gets up, Mike, and says the following before anything is done. as the invocation, let us hope that the care, diligence, and wisdom we will bring to the decisions we will make today honors those seven generations ago who made it possible for us to be here today so that we can hope that seven generations from today will honor our decisions.

1:15:10That's a timeless story. It doesn't sound like a story. It is a story. And then they do a second thing that I love, they name the names. So now let's come back to the ghosts that we talked about a while ago, but now they're good ghosts, and they bring in those ghosts by naming the names, and they're not ghosts, now they join the meeting. They name the names, and there's a great belief in human beings that you are not gone as long as your name is present. So these are timeless ways, in my view, all tribes around the world do the same thing. Timeless ways to hasten slowly.

1:15:49Timeless ways to say we have to make decisions, but let's look at the sweep of the consequences of those decisions. Let's bring in, by naming the names, those whose consciousness we want present here. We want their wisdom here. So story comes in many different ways, doesn't it? But the family story is unique to itself. And now unique to itself, and it's also simply different than all other families. It's not hubris. It's not better. It's a different story.

1:16:18How's that?

Mike1:16:18I'm glad I asked, Jay. It's a wonderful perspective. Thank you for sharing that with us. And of course, we have overindulged in the amount of time that I've taken with you, but I've enjoyed this greatly. So we're up to our final question. And it's a question that I ask everybody who comes on the podcast, Jay. Imagine you're writing a letter to your children. What is one lesson or idea that you don't think many parents would mention, but you consider important to understand?

Jay1:16:49Mike, I would say to them above all that they are loved. And with that, I would say I would ask their forgiveness. And that's about all I would say. And I can pretty much tell you that they wouldn't be surprised by those two reflections.

Mike1:17:04Beautiful. I like that very much. Jay Hughes, this has been an incredible honor and a privilege for me today to get to have another conversation with you and this time record it. Your work has greatly inspired my journey and countless others. And I thank you for your generosity in sharing all that you've learned and continuing your good work. At almost 80 years old, as you said, you've been in this line, I think, for 55 years, and you're still contributing great new value every year. So, thank you for all that you do, and thank you again for sharing with us today.

Jay1:17:45Well, Michael, thank you, and thank all of the people who have taken their time, which is their treasure, to be wise enough to have found their way to you, and to be wise enough to understand that you bring to them gifts that are true gifts. My humble offerings today are small compared to the gifts that you're giving, and your listeners are blessed, and I feel blessed that I've been one of them today, and I've been listening, I hope, as carefully as you've been asking questions. And may all of their families flourish, May all of them have happy rising generations, and may Mother Nature say that her proverb about shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves will not apply to them because they have figured out

1:18:34how to work with her rather than against her. Namaste.

Mike1:18:39What a beautiful way to finish. Namaste. Thank you, Jay. To find more episodes of the Business of Family podcast, go to businessoffamily.net. Thanks for listening to The Business of Family. You'll find the transcript and key ideas from this conversation at businessoffamily.net, along with the Business Family Diagnostic. It's free, and it shows you where your own family stands. And if someone in your family should hear this episode, please send it to them too. I'm Mike Boyd. Until next time, take care.