What a family hands down is a structure, not a skill. Skills expire. A structure lets the next person learn the next one.
My mother told me to read. She never told me what. Early on I walked library shelves and took books at random, and some stuck and some did not. Later, a company where I worked bought any book I asked for, whether or not it had anything to do with my job. Nobody graded what went in. They judged what I made of it.
My uncle gave me a door and nothing else. I was fourteen, washing dishes, the only job open to me, and then he stayed out of it. He also taught me algebra and calculus before my school did. He carries the name of a great-granduncle who was run out of Alabama for doing the sums. No one in my family ever spoke of passing it on. It showed up in the work.
I tried to do the same. I walked a young man in the door and stayed out of what came next. I left, and he made the arc true without me.
We run our house the same way. We paid the bill and put no hand on the scale. When one of my children applied to college, the child wrote every word of the essays. We doubled up the children's math in the summers, in the heat, so they would reach calculus in high school. Work runs on reason. Emotion is for people.
For a parent and for an investor the question is the same: did you build the capacity, or hand over a result? Back the learner. Skills depreciate faster than the ability to pick up the next one.
We are here a short time and can bend the arc only a little. The arc does not arrive. It evolves, and each of us bends it a little and hands it on.
Sources: the phrase “the arc” traces to Theodore Parker's 1853 sermon, which Martin Luther King Jr. later paraphrased; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), on the sharecropping settlement and the danger of disputing it. The family, the uncle, the young man and the children are the author's account and cannot be independently sourced.
Related: Choose the Job That Teaches. This is the author's account and is not investment advice.