Cara brought so much joy, love, and perspective to our family, and her life continues to shape the way I think about what matters most. She remains at the heart of our family story — not defined by losing her, but by everything she taught us and what we learned through the experience. Rewriting my ethical will after Cara’s death is when I understood what the document was actually for. It wasn’t a backup plan. It was the only place resilience, gratitude, and presence could be passed down in my own words — instead of secondhand, through someone else’s account of who I was or from someone’s fading memories.
Families spend years planning how wealth will pass from one generation to the next. We work with attorneys, advisors, and tax professionals to think carefully about what we will leave to our loved ones. We invest enormous resources in transferring financial assets — and almost nothing in transferring the values and experiences that gave that wealth its purpose.
That imbalance takes on greater significance when you consider the scale of what will pass from one generation to the next. An estimated $84 trillion is expected to change hands in the U.S. by 2045 as older generations pass wealth to their heirs, the largest generational wealth transfer in history. We are spending an extraordinary amount of time preparing to transfer the assets, but I believe we have a responsibility to think just as carefully about whether we are passing along the judgment, perspective, and knowledge that helped create and steward the wealth.
Those things deserve a succession plan, too. In fact, they may be the most valuable asset that you pass to the next generation.
An ethical will is not a legal document, and it does not replace a traditional estate plan. Rather, it complements one by capturing the human side of a family legacy. It is a place to preserve our family history, the experiences that shaped us, the mistakes we made, the people who influenced us, and the lessons about business, relationships, family, community, and life that took decades to acquire.
I first learned about ethical wills from Susan Turnbull, a pioneer in the field. I reached out to her directly, and she helped me write my first draft in 2007. I wanted to chronicle the experiences and lessons that had shaped my life so my children would have them if something happened to me unexpectedly. When I finished that first version, I felt an enormous sense of peace. I knew that if life did not unfold as I hoped, my wife Jill and our children, Greg, Cara, and Jake, would still have my words and a deeper understanding of who I was and what mattered to me most.
I quickly determined that an ethical will should be a living document. The rewrite taught me the real lesson: an ethical will only works if you keep returning to it.
Writing my ethical will also illustrated how many of the values I considered my own had been handed down to me. My grandparents taught me about family, hard work, and making the most of the opportunities available to you. My mother taught me the importance of curiosity, education, and pushing beyond what was comfortable. My father, the original entrepreneur in our family, taught me about hard work, generosity, communication, resourcefulness, and the importance of relationships. Jill has taught me about resilience, being present, and living a joyful life. Mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends have added countless lessons.
We talk frequently about the power of compounding financial assets. I believe our life experiences compound as well. The lessons passed from one generation to another accumulate over time, shaping how we make decisions, raise our children, build businesses, navigate difficult moments, and understand our responsibilities to others. Their compounded value can be extraordinary. Writing an ethical will gave me a reason to stop and trace some of those ideas back to their source.
It is one thing to tell your children that integrity matters, that relationships are important, or that they should be resourceful when things go wrong. It is much more meaningful when they understand how you learned those lessons, when you saw them tested, and how they served you. An ethical will can provide a deeper understanding of a family’s core values, where they came from, and why they have endured.
Families can spend decades preparing the next generation to inherit financial capital. We create trusts, tax strategies, governance structures, and succession plans. All of that is important. But financial capital is only one form of inheritance. We should bring the same intentionality to transferring our human, intellectual, and social capital. An estate plan can explain what you are leaving behind and how it should be transferred. An ethical will can help explain why.
For anyone considering writing one, I would resist making the exercise too complicated. Start with your own story. Who shaped you? Which experiences changed you? What mistakes taught you something worth preserving? What matters most to you?
The objective is not to write a rulebook for someone else’s life. Our children must make their own choices and create lives of their own making. My intention is simply to give them something they can return to as they encounter their own moments of truth. We can share wisdom earned through experience. We can introduce them to people they may never have had the opportunity to know. We can explain not simply what we believe, but why.
My hope is that many years from now, something I write today will help my children understand where they came from, remember the values that shaped our family, and decide for themselves where they want to go.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
