A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—in other words, during my sophomore year at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania—a professor offered a course called “Shakespeare and Modernity.” When asked what the reading list would be, he replied—rather offhandedly—“a little Shakespeare and a little Nietzsche.” The very next semester, he offered a course called “Shakespeare and Antiquity.” I suspect you won’t believe me, but again he said the reading list would be a little Shakespeare and a little Nietzsche. I lost a C note when I bet my roommate that, before we graduated, the guy would teach a course called “Antiquity and Modernity,” the reading list would be a little Shakespeare and a little Nietzsche. The teacher took a visiting professorship before we graduated—otherwise, I’m certain I’d be a hundred dollars richer today. I didn’t take any of those courses, and I haven’t read very much Nietzsche, but the other day, I came across something he wrote that struck me: “If one has a why in life, one can endure any how.”

If you asked me to identify one thing that’s the single best predictor of long-term success and happiness in families—and by long-term, I mean success, continuity and happiness over two, three, four generations or more, truly geologic time in the life of a family—I’d say it’s that successful families are aligned around a set of deeply-held shared values—their “why” in life. They have a common purpose, and they all know they do; they understand that they share a sense of where they’re going together and what they’re trying to accomplish as a family. They’ve got a deep sense of what it’s all for. And because they do, they can endure almost anything and confront almost any challenge or obstacle, just as Nietzsche said.

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Some families have a natural sense of their why; it develops organically over time, without conscious thought or effort. It’s simply in their genes. Other families have to work at it; they have to tease it out; they have to work to find it. Over the four decades I’ve been working with ultra-wealthy families, the best process I’ve found for those who need to find their “why” in life and achieve alignment around it is to work together as a family to create a family mission statement.

A family mission statement is a family’s uniquely personalized statement of their “why.” While every family’s mission statement is different, mission statements generally should express the family’s vision of who they are, how they’re different from other families and what they seek to perpetuate, their sense of purpose and meaning, their understanding of their family history and traditions; their expression of the legacy they wish to pass on to future generations.

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The Process

Creating a family mission statement can be one of the most intensely unifying and powerful experiences in the family’s life. That assertion often engenders a fair amount of skepticism. After all, how can a mere piece of paper—and one that isn’t even a binding legal document at that—be so powerful a force? Of course, the answer is that its force and impact derive not from the mission statement itself—as strong and powerful as it may be—but from the process of creating it and revisiting it regularly. When done well, that is, when the document isn’t simply a collection of mere platitudes, the process of creating the family mission statement demands that family members participate meaningfully so that the statement that emerges is the product of significant reflection, discussion and debate. While no one family member might find the final statement perfect—it’s not an individual mission statement, after all—the end product should be one that all family members endorse. Working together to articulate a statement that belongs to everyone collectively and reflects the family’s collective judgments and decisions can be extraordinarily powerful, even at times surprisingly revelatory.

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But the families that stop at this point don’t get the real benefits of a family mission statement: even a perfectly crafted mission statement, if relegated to a desk drawer, will never have the impact it could. The families who ultimately succeed in weaving the family mission statement into the fabric of their life together as a family are the families who return to it periodically and ask themselves four critical questions:

If families answer those questions honestly, the answer to the third question almost always will be some version of “no”: “well, not always,”; “not quite,”; “not really,” and sometimes just a flat-out “no.” That’s because the essence of being human is getting it wrong, making mistakes and falling short. We humans are often off track—we do things we wish we hadn’t done and say things we wish we hadn’t said. Some of us may be off track more often than we’re on course. And if that’s right, then the fourth question becomes the most important one: “Lookit, we all agreed that this would be our mission; we’ve just acknowledged that we’ve veered off course; OK, no harm done, we’re all still here; we’ve got another shot; what do we have to do to get back on track?”

Because the reality is that all families—happy and unhappy, healthy and dysfunctional—get it wrong from time to time, the most profound difference between successful and unsuccessful families isn’t that the successful ones don’t get it wrong; it’s that the successful ones continually find a way to try again, to get back on track. For some families, the way they get back on track is by recommitting to their family mission statement and trying to make the adjustments that will get them back on course. Where the family mission statement plays that central role in a family, it becomes the ultimate expression of their “why” in life and functions as their destination (we are we going together in life as a family?), their flight plan (how are we going to get there?) and their compass (if we’ve veered off course, what do we need to do to get back onto our flight plan).

Many ultra-wealthy clients are concerned that their descendants will come to form attitudes of entitlement and that such attitudes will impair their initiative, ambition and accomplishment. (Of course, we know that many such clients are the enablers of those attitudes of entitlement.) I believe the best way to prevent the formation of such attitudes is to build what I call a culture of family partnership—not partnership in the technical, legal sense, but partnership in the sense that, as a family, we’re in this thing together.