How to Save Family Wisdom For Your Posterity Everybody is talking about...

How to Save Family Wisdom For Your Posterity

Everybody is talking about intergenerational wealth, but few talk about intergenerational wisdom.

Keep a journal as you discover life, live well, make mistakes, and grow. Pass it on to your children.

Write letters to your children, grandchildren, and further descendants that include appropriate wisdom for what they are facing. Be open and honest about your mistakes and how you addressed them. They will face similar things, and your solutions will help them.

Tell them your learned wisdom and that you love them. Let them know what sacrifices have been made so that they can exist and how happy you are to have paid the price to produce generations. Give them advice, encouragement, and hope. Help them see their place as links in a great chain of humans stretching back to the first man and forward to eternity.

“Letter for all descendants to be read on their 10th birthday.”

“Letter for male descendants to be read when they start puberty.”

“Letter for all descendants to be read on the day of their marriage.”

“Letter for all descendants to be read on the birth of their first child.”

“A Christmas poem to be read to the gathered family every December 25th at noon.”

Make it a habit, a culture, and a tradition to read your letters and encourage other family members to annotate them so that the family wisdom grows and adapts over time. Keep the documents “secret” until they are to be read to create antisipation.

Appoint someone responsible and older in the family as the “Keeper of the Family Lore”. Maybe two people. They should each have an updated copy of every document in the family. Every family member should get a copy of the documents read to them. I recommend keeping multiple encrypted digital copies and physical copies printed on archival paper.

What else would you add to the list of letters and messages to send in the future to your descendants?