Gathering Your Family Stories – Legacy – Episode 470

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Kim, we’re going to be talking about storytelling, but wrapping in the legacy element. This fits in perfect with books you’ve written. And so first, will you first explain what book this pairs up with? I think that’ll be helpful for listeners, and then we’ll set the stage of the storytelling. Absolutely. So it pairs up best with our newest book, which is Perpetual Wealth, that’s available now. Hardback, Kindle, a soft cover, audio, you name it, with thanks to Spencer for help with the audio book. And it has some ideas in there around family legacy in form of a family retreat. And of course, here we have July 4th coming up, and it isn’t, you know, we think about

[00:51] the word retreat and think it has to be this fancy pre-planned thing. No, not at all. It could be hamburgers, you know, in the backyard, around the pool, whatever. But storytelling, as we know, gets us fabulous results and is one of the most helpful things that families can do together. And so I’m excited to have this conversation with you. I think your family does an amazing job of storytelling, and I’m interested to learn from you as much as I hope to be able to share some fun things with our listeners. Wonderful. I think first is, it helps to set a couple of guideposts, because, you know, as we’re building in that family legacy, we want to make sure that we’re incorporating everyone. And so one is setting an age of when people should be having those stories, and I use

[01:42] the word should, use that loosely. But whenever you have a family member that hits the age of 70, we’ll call it, may even be 60, it would be pretty essential to make sure that you’ve extracted the stories from there. And I’ll explain deeper than that. I was listening to someone tell a story about this, and he said, yeah, our family’s actually hired an archivist. And they go through and they say, okay, well, grandpa was in the war, and this was the first business he started, and these are the investments he did, and this is where it went south, and this is where he recovered. And they say, knowing the specifics, and then going in and say, grandpa, tell me about, and then something specific, tell me about your time in the war, or tell

[02:31] me about this business. You’re going to get a lot better results than saying, what are some of the favorite things you did in your life? Yes, that prompt, I think, is so insightful and so helpful to get the specifics of the story, and human beings love talking about themselves. You know, we can say, oh, we don’t, or no, I won’t, or whatever, but the fact is the stories are there, and I love to elicit not only the positive good things that occurred and the stories behind them, but also the times that were tough, that there was something overcome or persevered. I think the idea of getting wisdom from one generation to the next, whether it’s people in their 60s and 70s to people in their 40s or people in their

[03:25] 60s and 70s, you know, down to the, call it age 10 level of grandchild probably at that point, maybe great grandchild, who knows, but that is such a valuable thing, and it’s super easy to just overlook and not think that it’s important. Absolutely. So I remember on one of our episodes in the past, and this may have been six months to a year ago, you mentioned that you and Todd, your husband, were out working on the property, and you had this fence that had to get mended. And can we know that you’re a hard worker? We’ve never doubted that. And I think all of us are the type of people, like the go-getters, we just want to go, go, go, and get it all done. But you had the epiphany at that moment to look at it and say, wait, this

[04:15] is a legacy fence, and help us walk through that, because I want to pull that piece of the fence actually and thread it into this story here. Literally, right? So the epiphany that I had was that we are going to look at our property in 25-year increments, instead of what can we get done this weekend, and the challenge with looking at it as what we can get done this weekend, which I still fall into that habit probably every weekend, is you end up being stressed, because of course you never, ever get done on a weekend, especially on a farm, what you hope, or even if you get one thing done, 15 other things crop up that also need to be done. And so it was causing every weekend to not be enjoyable for me, because

[05:06] I was always chomping at the bit. We got to get this done, we got to get this done. And I was making myself miserable, sometimes like literally physically working too hard and being completely exhausted on Monday, or whatever the case may be, mentally miserable also, just because of the timeframe and the perspective. So with thanks to Dan Sullivan, who was talking about living his life in 25-year increments, I thought, well, okay, this is a legacy property. I can live on this property, have a 25-year perspective on the work that I want to get done instead of a weekend long perspective, and understand that whatever we get done is going to contribute towards good in that 25 years, and then the next 25 years and the next 25 years, and also

[05:56] whatever we don’t get done has time and space within that 25-year period to get done. And it really was a major shift in my perspective, helped me enjoy my weekends better, I’m sure it helped me be a little more enjoyable to be around because I wasn’t so hard driving about everything and antsy and frustrated because things weren’t getting done as fast as I wanted, and that long term perspective, that long-term point of view is something like said, I still have to remind myself of it often. And yet when I do, it’s so valuable and I really make different decisions because of it. And Todd is skilled at this. He always does things really thoroughly and right. And I would tend to sort of slap stuff together and be like,

[06:49] oh, it’s good enough for now, but he’ll do it so that it will actually last 25 years or 50 or whatever the case may be. And so that’s been a good perspective as well. Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to hear that story because there are several things in there that are principles and frameworks that we can use in our life. One, because you’re looking at it from a 25-year perspective, that’s a generation. So in the family office and wealth space, they talk in the terms of G1, G2, G3, G4, G5, et cetera. And that means that, you know, generation one created the wealth, generation two, maybe got to enjoy some of it. Generation three experienced all the wealth. And in many cases from your book, Perpetual Wealth, we know that a

[07:39] lot of people squander it and lose it. Now, by looking at it from that perspective, you’ve now created opportunities for those generations to learn. So going back to storytelling, you mentioned also sharing the hardships, the difficult times. I personally find that it’s much easier to learn from others’ hardships instead of me having to go through it. I’m not saying that I’m perfect at that by any means. So how can we tie in the generational piece with storytelling so that we can help listeners? Well, I think it’s so valuable to be willing to share, number one, and then be willing to share the hard parts too, and it can be embarrassing. And so this is why I think a lot of people don’t talk about money, period,

[08:29] is so many generations do not do a good job of it, even those that may feel like they have plenty. I still think they would admit that they kind of got there by default. You know, there’s definitely some real wins, but in a lot of cases, they still don’t feel like they’ve quote on a good job, you know, by whatever measuring stick with the money that they have. And so being willing to share our mistakes is a real sign of humility. It’s so valuable for the next generation to enable the older generation to be human, and as you said, maybe it will even help that next generation avoid some of those same mistakes. And so like in our family, we have literally just created the space for everybody to share one win that was awesome, like last year or last, you

[09:22] know, quarter, whenever we’re getting together, whatever the last timeframe is in the more recent space and one failure and what they learned from it. And by getting that habit going, it enables everybody to share number one. So you’re not like the only one sharing a failure. And number two, it’s a habitual thing, failure, learn, failure, learn. And that way we get all the good out of that failure spread G1, G2, and G3 for our family now. Of course, baby Bindi is probably not actually listening very well, but you get the point. We do have grandparents around, so that there’s still a G3, I guess, if you think about it that way. But the fact of the sharing of the failure and the learning that

[10:08] is just become normal is what’s so valuable. And I know there are other families out there. We have a joyful reader that actually works with another insurance agent, David and his family, that have shared with us numerous photos of some of their family retreats and the giving that they’re doing that’s generationally driven and the story time that they have and some of the exercises they’re doing, and I’m always so grateful to hear that and that the Perpetual Wealth is doing the book’s work that we designed it to do. I love hearing it too. Let’s talk a little on the implementation of this, just to give you as a listener tools at your hand. So one, just take out your cell phone. And if you have a conversation, you know, with an elderly

[11:00] grandparent or parents, you could even use a child, but you can just record a video of the two of you speaking, if they’re not comfortable with video, you can always take the phone and just record on voice. There’s an app called Otter.ai and that will transcribe everything you say. And now you have the starting of a journal or a biography or something of that nature. What other implementation pieces would you put in place? Maybe you can put in the framework of the space that you do it or how the questions that are asked or how it’s done. What does that look like for you, Kim? Well, I’m actually most excited about something that we’ve hinted at a couple of times on the podcast and is finally super close to being ready.

[11:46] And that’s our family legacy game, because we know that this is a space that parents and grandparents and children need support. And so we came up with a family legacy game that’s built off one chapter in the perpetual wealth book. And it’s a super simple card game. It, you know, it’s not going to be anything fancy, but it will do the job of eliciting the stories. And there are many others out there like that. Storytelling apps, storytelling games, card games, et cetera, that can just drive good questions. And then I like what you said about the space. And I don’t know that every family has the ability to create the kind of space that some families do. I certainly credit ours. We have a fourth generation farm.

[12:34] We have three generations that live here all within a couple of miles of each other. You know, that’s a very special environment. And yet that’s createable by others, even if they don’t have the actual physical space. So it could be a hotel in the city. It could be an Airbnb, you know, in the suburban area, wherever. I mean, there’s all kinds of different ways to pull a family together. It could just be a zoom call where everybody’s camera is on if possible. And, you know, all their pictures are on the screen and you just go around. It’s a quick share. It’s a quick learning. There’s so much good that comes from it. And it’s awkward at first. I’ll be the first to admit that, but the second time around is easier.

[13:18] And the third time is easier than that. That’s good. And it takes work and it’s work that’s worth doing. I think from every person that I’ve spoken with, the stories and the memories are the things that they wish they would have had. Doing the work of contacting Kim and getting your family legacy set up financially is absolutely essential. Make sure you do that. There’s actually a special email address. It’s hello at prosperity thinkers.com. So you can get up all of your financial pieces in order, but the financial pieces in order, that’s the foundation so that you can take care of all the other things. And I think if you don’t have both of them together, you don’t feel balanced, meaning you can have all the stories in the world, but if you

[14:06] can’t pass it off and know that you have some certainty in place, it doesn’t have as much meaning. And if you have all the certainty in place, but you don’t have the connection of that family, then you’re not going to have as much confidence in the future as well. Very well said. Yeah. Super important to have both and doesn’t need to have lots and lots of zeros behind the dollars. Nor do the stories to feel like you have that game totally dialed in. Just start with one sentence, a simple question, like you brought up earlier, you know, get super specific. It’s always better when they’re more specific. Answer the question, move on, tackle it again the next month and you’ll see better and better results each step along the way.

[14:57] Thank you for listening to the prosperity podcast to take control of your money and have it work for you. Visit prosperity thinkers.com.