Family Wealth: — Keeping It in the Family — How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations, Revised and Expanded Edition

EPILOGUE

I hope that as you have progressed through the chapters of this book, you have come to believe that it is possible for a family to achieve long-term wealth preservation. I am sure you also now realize how hard that is, and how relentless the forces implied by the proverb "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" will be in trying to thwart your efforts. I also hope that the spiritual foundation on which your work as a family is predicated has grown along with your practices so that your experience of love, expressed as joy and gratitude for the blessings of your individual happiness and that of every member of your family, continues to sustain all of you now and into the future.

Together, we have learned that a family's wealth consists of three forms of capital—human, intellectual, and financial—and that the management of the first two is the most critical to the successful preservation of a family's wealth. We have discovered that this is an extremely long-term process, measured in periods of twenty, fifty, and one hundred years. We have determined that the mission of a family that decides to attempt long-term wealth preservation lies in enhancing the individual pursuits of happiness of each family member in order to promote growth of the human, intellectual, and financial assets of the family as a whole.

We have discussed practices that will help us achieve our goal, especially those we use to express and share what we have learned about ourselves and our families ...