“I can live for two months on one good compliment.”

Mark Twain

There once was a scared boy. He was dirt poor. His father was never around. He moved from town to town and never had any friends. He was extremely insecure and had very little self-confidence. He was a very poor student with bad grades for years.

Then one day in class, his teacher put a question to class. “How many square inches of tin do you need to make a tin can?”

He was the first one that had the answer. The teacher told him, “You have the makings of being a great engineer.”

That compliment made his day. It was so powerful and so affirming that it stuck with him for the rest of his life. He became an engineer. He help design the 747, earned several patents and was the lead engineer on the tunnel boring machine that dug the tunnel under the English Channel.

Word are very, very powerful. Words of encouragement and affirmation can change a person’s life. Words can indeed sustain a person for two months or even a lifetime.

Ever had an epiphany? Ever had a life shattering moment of awakening to a life changing truth? These are a very big deal. You should share these moments with your grandchildren in your letter.

My biggest epiphany came to me when I was about 25 years old. I was living by myself and exploring the world with my own eyes after living at home for the first 20 years of my life. I was questioning everything I had been taught by my parents and my religion. I was out there exploring in the wilderness. It was scary, but I was brave. I know in my heart I was doing the right thing.

I had been breaking off from my lifetime of religious doctrine and exploring new spirituality by reading about Zen. It was very enlightening and expanded my previously enclosed thinking. I don’t know if it mattered, but I was reading “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller when the lightening struck me.

Bam! A billion volts blasted through me.

“I could never understand it all.”

That was was the thought that burst into my mind.

I could never understand everything I wanted to understand or needed to understand to have my life make perfect sense. At the very best I could understand some things. Hopefully that would be enough. But, also I might just be fooling myself. Maybe there was so much to learn that reading 100 or 1,000 books would never be enough to have a sufficient grasp of what I truly needed to live a good life. Why try to understand things if I would never understand enough? Why push that huge rock up the hill Sisyphus? Why try if it is all futile?

That was one of my epiphany moments. It was a very big “Ah Ha.” 

Have you ever had one of those kinds of moments when the ground under your feet gives way or you get kicked in the head?

These experiences are worth sharing in your letter to your grandchildren. They too are going to have life changing moments. Let them know they are coming. Let them know they are part of the amazing human experience.

Hal Urban wrote a book entitled “Life’s Greatest Lessons – 20 Things That Matter.” Great book. Great format for a letter to your grandchildren.

He lists things like the truth that life is hard, the importance of being honest with yourself, that we live by choices – not chance and the importance of good habits. With many of these lessons he speaks about his life experiences.

The writing is clear and direct. The chapters are short and to the point. It is a very well written book. It is fun to read and easy to read. But it is also packed with wisdom and worth reading several times.

This is one great format for a letter to your grandchildren. It combines your best wisdom with life stories. It is distilled life experiences.

Just as a quick exercise can you list your top three life lessons that you would want to pass on to your grandchildren? In a week, could you come up with your top ten?

Einstein made some of his greatest discoveries with thought experiments. One of his most famous experiments was imagining he was traveling at the speed of light. What would that be like? This thought experiment ultimately led to his discovery of the special theory of relativity. Here is thought experiment about writing a letter to your grandchildren.

Suppose you are hiking, you break a glass bottle on the trail and it creates shards of glass. If you don’t clean it up, a child walking somewhere behind you will cut themselves on one of those shards. Does it matter if it is an hour later, a day later, a week later or a year later? No. Harm is harm and pain is pain. The passage of time – even a great deal of time, doesn’t lessen the help you can give some people. 

The point is that just because some of your descendants are not living in the present moment, doesn’t mean they count less. They are still your family and your descendants. 

We look at the future as in front of us. The past is behind us. But, you can also look at it as your descendants are following behind you. They will come down a similar path to your current path. Pick up the broken glass. Leave them a compass and a map. Leave them an encouraging letter and help them succeed.