Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 278 | Stop Comparing Your Family to Someone Else's

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Ep. 278 | Stop Comparing Your Family to Someone Else's · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  You know, trying to be another family is almost saying that like, you know, God doesn't need my family on earth, you know, which isn't true.
• 0:10
  What's up, guys? Welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. So Jeff and I just got done recording a Dad's Building Teens episode about the nuclear family was a mistake. It was a really in-depth conversation around David Brooks' article. And one of the comments that we discussed was, you cannot fix in one year what it took a generation to destroy.
• 0:31
  And I think that that's actually a real serious challenge for a lot of families. We constantly are comparing ourselves, I think more than ever, to other families around us. We just are like, oh, look at them. And we see their Instagram life and we're totally feeling a sense of like, oh, what's wrong with my family? And how quickly can I get there? And this discouragement can set in so quickly. So, yeah, I wanted to tease out this with you, Jeff. Like how should families think about...
• 0:58
  just the project, the multi-generational project, trying to recover from potentially a really challenging, like upstream generation. Totally. And I think, yeah, and what's interesting too is the timing of this. Even this morning, I was writing my next book, which people, if they follow me, notice it's kind of on family stuff and all that. Super stoked on it. But I was even thinking this morning, I had to like,
• 1:17
  really get into my own head where, you know, my natural inclination and probably most people, but maybe even more so me is I love to just like teach and talk about concepts and ideas. So then I'm just, you know, I immediately want to run into that stuff. When I realized with this book specifically, it's like, I have to really go back and put myself in almost every stage of learning this stuff and try to be as first person in that historical date as much as possible. Just because, yeah, I felt really a heavy sense of just people need to kind of feel and see how,
• 1:45
  I don't know if experimental is the right word, but just how like workshoppy and how much time it does take to do this. Right. Because it's very easy to see other families and their journey. But what you have to do is never compare your journey to another family's journey because you're not living their life. And so to do that.
• 2:02
  is kind of actually abdicating your own family identity. You know, trying to be another family is almost saying that like, you know, God doesn't need my family on earth, you know, which isn't true. He needs every single team, you know, no matter what it looks like, you know. And so, yeah, I just think that have you let that quote really sink in? Have you let that concept really sink in? And are you ready for that? Like there's also a little bit of counting the cost there, right? Of like, hey, this –
• 2:25
  But, you know, there can be there's even some possibilities here, too. You know, like even, you know, the famous example I talk about sometimes is the Rothschild example, you know, like the dad, you know, at certain levels, it's different for everyone. But the dad was not wealthy pretty much by any means until like the last few days of his life. I mean, it was years. I mean, like it was comparatively at the end.
• 2:42
  You know, he was very much lower class and then middle class for like up to 60 years of old, you know. And so the same way that he, but he had such a vision of not caring about him dying super wealthy, but just actually just kind of having the football farther down the field and having his sons be incredibly wealthy and banking dynasties that he laid that vision out. And so I don't think, we're not talking about wealth here, but I think spiritual wealth of like spiritual impact and legacy, you have to, sometimes if you're starting late, you have to have that same perspective that this is a,
• 3:10
  This is a hundred year game. It's a 200 year game. I probably won't achieve a touchdown at some level, you know, if I'm starting later or whatever. And so I don't know if that makes sense, but what would you say to that?
• 3:22
  Yeah, totally. I always take as my inspiration, Abraham, who like he, like it says in Hebrews. There's like no fruit really. He basically died with like one kid, you know, kids. One kid in a tent, but he had a dream of this multi-generational family and it's impacted the world ever since. And so what could happen if you really gave yourself to the development of that?
• 3:44
  if Abraham was completely obsessed with his individual life or he just sort of gave up hope because he wasn't seeing the fruit in his generation, we wouldn't have had all of the, um, the blessings of his multi-generational family line that's coming all the way down to us, even to this day. And that's something we all should be inspired to see about is there really is almost no limit to what your family can, how your family can bless the world multi-generationally, but there is a very, uh, defined limit, um, about what you can do in a short period of time.