The Two-Wheel Model: A Good Life and an Enduring Family

The Wheel of a Good Life

In the immensely popular Leadership Fellows course at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, every student does a “Wheel of Life” exercise, scoring their satisfaction with the most important questions in life (note: satisfaction, not absolute height).

The six factors in the Wheel of a Good Life are: mission, career, finances, family, health, and relationships.

Facing these six factors, I think each person can ask themselves a few questions, so as to clarify their relationship with these matters — for example:

• Do you know your mission clearly? What is it? Are you making an effort toward it?
• Does your career satisfy you? What value does it create? Does it make you “tap-dance to work” each day?
• Is your financial situation healthy? Besides active income, are you building passive income? Do you have a goal and a timeline for your own financial freedom?
• How are your relationships with your family? Do love, respect, understanding, and joy flow among you at all times? Are you giving your family enough of your attention?
• Do you have a habit of exercise? Do you pay attention to a healthy diet? How is your sleep? Have you tried meditation?
• Are your relationships of high quality? Do the friends you spend the most time with lift your understanding, your abilities, and your state of mind? And what value do you create for others?

You can pose yourself more questions, and then, at intervals, give yourself a focused stretch of time to reflect and review, scoring yourself by satisfaction — 0 the lowest, 10 the highest. Connect the points that represent each score with lines, and you will see the state of balance across the six areas, and whether it can become a “wheel” that will actually turn.

The reason for measuring by satisfaction rather than by worldly absolute height — rank, amount of wealth, and the like — is that each person has different resources, different strengths, and different goals, so each question plays a different role in each person’s life. Learning to know yourself, honoring the voice within, racing against yourself, and viewing your life by satisfaction rather than forever comparing absolute heights — this matters greatly.

The Wheel of an Enduring Legacy

Here at Flourishing Tree Family Office we also have a Six Capitals model for assessing whether a family can endure across generations. It was researched and created by Flourishing Tree partner Carolyn, drawing on the reference Complete Family Wealth and combining it with the cases of Chinese family clients, as shown in the figure below.

The family’s six capitals are: Legacy Capital, Human Capital, Family Relationship Capital, Financial Capital, Structural Capital, and Social Capital.

• Legacy Capital is composed of the family’s core values and shared sense of purpose. It is the “family brand,” which sets the family apart and gives its members a shared sense of identity.
• Human Capital includes the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of individual family members, as well as their capacity to learn, to grow, and to adapt.
• Family Relationship Capital reflects the ability of family members to discuss difficult questions together and to collaborate on complex work. More fundamentally, it reflects whether there exists a family culture of trust, respect, and fairness. Family Relationship Capital includes how the family integrates the different voices of spouses, partners, and new members of the family.
• Financial Capital includes both business capital and investment capital.
• Families or family enterprises with substantial wealth usually operate within a structure or network made up of family trusts, partnerships, contracts, financial investments, and other legal, tax, or business relationships. Structural Capital includes the understanding of this network and the ability to navigate it effectively.
• Social Capital represents the family’s relationship with the outside world — the sum of the social relationships, networks, and reputation the family possesses.

Each year we also accompany our family clients in assessing the state of the six capitals, to see whether this “wheel” of family legacy can turn well.

The Two-Wheel Model

When we place the Wheel of a Good Life and the Wheel of an Enduring Family side by side, we discover a two-wheel drive mechanism. A family is made up of individual members, and when those members can take responsibility for their own lives and pursue and realize their own good life, they naturally feed that energy back into the family, driving it to develop and endure better. And the family, standing at a higher vantage, drives the Wheel of an Enduring Family to turn better — while at the same time gathering the goals and strengths of its members together, producing a greater “force of shared frequency,” and using the family’s platform and strength to better realize each member’s own goals of a good life.

So how can we drive the various factors of the two wheels to rise together? In truth it varies from person to person, and there is no fixed answer. Even in the setting of the factors themselves, different people and families may differ slightly. But I will offer some reflections, in the hope that they can become your own “boat for crossing the river,” rather than my carrying you across.

Mission

In the Wheel of a Good Life, mission is a very important factor. And among the six capitals of the Wheel of an Enduring Family, Legacy Capital is likewise about establishing the family’s mission and values. So what is a mission? And how does one establish it?

Let us first distinguish a few concepts:

• A “job” is your means of making a living. When choosing a job, you look at whether it is good for you: how much it pays, how close it is to home, how long the hours are, and so on.
• A mission is a calling that waits for you to fulfill. This calling is long-term “work,” into which you may have to pour the strength of a lifetime. You must make a covenant with it.

Let me use an example to illustrate how the British writer George Orwell (author of the famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four) found his mission of writing.

From an early age Orwell knew he had a talent for writing, and writing was always calling him — but at first he did not think being a writer was a reliable profession.

Orwell first went to India to serve as a British police officer, then returned to England, preferring idleness to writing. He knew he wanted to write, but felt he should not; he was even angry at his own impulse to write… In the end he yielded to fate and resolved to settle down and write books.

Now note this: when Orwell resolved to write, what he did was not to first read a few “writing guides,” enroll in some writers’ class, do market research on what people now like to read, write a book of his own, and then go find some influencer to recommend it. Orwell decided that, to write, he had to do these three things:

First, he moved into a poor neighborhood and lived among the poor. Orwell’s politics were of the left, but he rather looked down on that crowd of British socialists, whom he considered intellectuals who could only talk big. They claimed they wanted to liberate the poor, yet they had never had any direct contact with the poor and did not understand them at all.

To experience life, Orwell took a job washing dishes in a restaurant, working thirteen hours a day.

Second, Orwell set out to invent a new way of writing. He wanted to use literary technique to write works of non-fiction. He became a master of the political allegory.

Orwell never once said how much he enjoyed writing; he considered writing a book a terrible struggle. This process purifies you and suppresses, rather than expresses, your individuality; you must hide the self as far as you can, so that the reader feels they are in direct contact with what you describe.

Third, in order to truly answer the calling of his mission, Orwell resolved to be “ruthlessly honest.” This meant he would not favor the comrades on his own side. If there was some fault on his own side, Orwell would write that too.

How many people today make of themselves the three demands Orwell made? Those who merely polish a “career” cannot do such things. The world does not care whether it has one more successful person; what the world needs are people who can make a difference.

All the examples of the pursuit of a mission share a very similar pattern: at the outset there is always a “calling.” A mission is called forth.

A mission is beautiful. The Greek word for “beauty” is kalon, and this word was originally connected to “calling”: this thing is so beautiful that you feel as if it is calling you to explore it, making you want to live with it ever after.

And so you can choose a job and a career, but you do not choose your mission — you are chosen by it. One day you suddenly feel, intensely, a calling: you feel this thing must be done, and must be done by you. This is the calling of your mission.

If one day you hear that voice within — or if you have already heard it — then follow its calling with courage.

The Factors That Motivate Us Toward Our Goals

Once we have a mission and a goal, in the process of realizing it we are certain to face trials, meet failure, and lose heart. At such times, how do we keep ourselves motivated and driven?

In the study of the dynamics of human behavior there is a theory known as the “two-factor theory” or “motivation theory.” On the subject of motivation, Frederick Herzberg may be one of the most insightful writers. He published a groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review devoted to this theory. Although he wrote it for managers running businesses, his findings on motivation apply equally to all of us.

This theory involves two different kinds of factors: basic factors and motivating factors.

At work, when certain basic factors fall short of our expectations, they leave us dissatisfied. The basic factors referred to here include status, salary, security, working conditions, company policy, and the like — all of which matter.

So what are the factors that truly satisfy us and make us love our work? Those are the “motivating factors” in Herzberg’s research. The motivating factors include: challenge, recognition, a sense of responsibility, and personal growth — because the factors intrinsic to the work itself make you feel you have made a meaningful contribution to it. Motivating factors have little to do with external stimulus, and far more to do with your own inner life and the intrinsic nature of the work.

As the saying goes, find work you love, and you will feel you have never worked a day in your life. People who truly love their work believe that what they do is deeply meaningful; they pour their best energy into it, and so they do it superbly.

So, in the same way, finding the challenge, the sense of worth, the sense of responsibility, and the personal growth within your mission and your calling will provide you with the self-driving motivation you need in the process of pursuing and realizing it.

In Summary

When you are called by a mission, and you have the inner drive to pursue it, then you will naturally find the ways to improve the mission, career, family, finances, health, and relationships in the Wheel of a Good Life, and likewise find the ways to improve the Legacy Capital, Human Capital, Family Relationship Capital, Financial Capital, Structural Capital, and Social Capital in the Wheel of an Enduring Family.

May the two wheels drive your good life and your enduring family.

References:

• The Good Life Operating Guide, by Yijia
• How Will You Measure Your Life?, by Clayton Christensen
• The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, by David Brooks