Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 209 | Learning From our Cultural Elders

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Ep. 209 | Learning From our Cultural Elders · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:01
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• 0:26
  At the end of the year, are we really taking a good hard look at what we did as a family?
• 0:35
  What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So one of the things that every society or culture begins to have is our sort of cultural elders. And one of our current elders in our culture that a lot of people are paying attention to is Bill Gates. One of the reasons why we need these people is that when they pierce into their 50s, 60s, 70s, we want to see what life looks like.
• 0:58
  when somebody is trying to live really intentionally into that season of life, when they are really at the height of their wisdom. And so there's a great documentary, by the way, Bill Gates' Brain on Netflix. Jeff's just downloaded on his iPad. I've watched all of them. I loved it, man. I just find this really interesting. But Inc. Magazine wrote an article about Bill Gates and just the contrast between his 25-year-old self, which you can see in those documentaries really well, and his current self.
• 1:28
  And so they tried to articulate the difference, and it was really interesting what they said. They discovered it. They said, for the 25-year-old Gates, the only question that mattered was posed to assess his business success at the end of the year. Is Microsoft software making the personal computing dream come true? That was the question that he really tied his personal success to.
• 1:47
  A new set of questions have emerged in his final 2018 blog post, Gates Notes. He said that he still assesses the quality of his work, but the questions are very different from the ones he would have asked in his 20s. Here they are. One, did I devote enough time to my family?
• 2:07
  Two, did I learn enough new things? Three, did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones? Gates readily admits these questions would have been laughable to him at 25. At 63, they're much more meaningful. So this is one of the problems that, you know, if you think about the 25-year-old Bill Gates, one of the things...
• 2:25
  that he was completely really probably disentangled from was really looking and gaining wisdom from his elders. He had great parents, by the way, but I think for sure he was so obsessed with this singular goal. But one of the things I love is just as the years go on and as wisdom really begins to settle, you see these guys just begin to reevaluate, okay, the questions I ask myself or how I judge my success
• 2:52
  so often determines the kind of trajectory I go in. And so he seems to be very careful with the way that he asks himself these sort of annual questions. And so obviously that first one, did I devote enough time to my family? That apart from all the other things, if you watch that documentary, he's trying to like, you know, rid the earth of polio and, you know, like fix sanitation for the third world and on and on and on these massive goals.
• 3:19
  And for a lot of men, they would think, well, if you're, you know, if you're stewarding billions of dollars and trying to solve world problems, then maybe the family goes on the back burner. And it's fascinating that his first question was just the amount of time he was spending with his family. But, yeah, Jeff, what are your thoughts on that?
• 3:35
  Yeah, I love that. I mean, I love when people have kind of achieved what everyone wants to achieve, but yet then are still asking interesting questions like that or ones that we might not think they would be like, you know, he's got all the money in the world, but clearly he's shown that that's not what's important. What's important is the things that he even says are more meaningful when he was older. So I think with the, you know, it does a service to not repeat mistakes by learning when you are 25, when you are 30 to ask the questions that the 63 year old is learning and asking. So then you can be far ahead of them once you're 63. So I think that's really, really
• 4:03
  and important. And I love that too, where he did have that singular question, even when he was 25 of his Microsoft software, making the personal computing dream come true. I think like we need to have questions as fathers, as families of, are we at the end of the year? Are we really taking a good hard look at what we did, you know, as a family, as a team, you know, you know, in our fatherhood, in our fatherness, you know, and as, as a coach, as a leader, all these different things. I think like, if we're really honing in on those questions year after year after year, it really
• 4:33
  hey guys can i just ask you a quick favor if you could just pause real quick well actually after i'm done with this so it makes sense in about for about 30 seconds and just rate and review this podcast we can 10x the number of dads we help through this content if our podcast can be found by more dads and one of the weird main things about this podcast game is that how they get ranked and how they get in front of other people essentially is because of how it gets rated and reviewed so if you can just give a quick honest rating and review we would greatly greatly appreciate it thanks guys