You want your letter to be sticky. To have your stories and your ideas stick with your grandchildren. If they read it and forget everything you wrote two weeks later, then its impact will be minimal. You want them to remember what you wrote. You want it to help them. This “stickiness” can be accomplished in three ways.

One is to tell stories that they will remember. This is done through emotion. They will remember what you wrote if you can touch their heart. Write stories that move them emotionally.

“Good stories have a way of staying with us for a long time. That’s why the best teachers and speakers use them so often.”

Hal Urban

A second way is to give them portable bits of wisdom. Give them memorable quotes or maxims. A great maxim will be remembered throughout a person’s life. These become very effective when they can be used to summarize a story you tell. The more they are repeated the more they will be remembered.

“Actions speak louder than words.”

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“Faith will move mountains.”

“God helps those who help themselves.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

A third way is to provide new words or expressions. One of the most popular books in the last 100 years is “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. In that book he writes about a concept he calls “major definite purpose.” It is about clarifying in your mind and in your life one singular aim or goal. He repeats those three words over and over again in the book. You remember those words and that concept long after you finish the book. Create your own new series of words. Create a new concept like “sticky letter.”

Using these techniques, you can make your letter stick in the minds and hearts of your grandchildren. They will carry your moving stories and your memorable wisdom with them. Your words will help them because they remember them.

Seems absurd, writing about something you don’t have.

I don’t have patience.

I have some, but not a lot. But at least I recognize that. That is the first step. Now I am working on improving my patience. 

It is a journey. I am making more progress. I am being mindful of the times I feel those old familiar sensations of frustration, anger and injustice. I am learning how to use that scared space between stimulus and response to choose my thoughts and thereby choose the way it is going to make me feel.

Changing

“It’s not fair that it should be this way to me.”

To

“It is foolish to have expectations that things should happen the way I want them to.”

Changing

“Here I am again waiting on someone else.”

To

“I have thought ahead, brought a book and can enjoy that during this time.”

This is being vulnerable. About exposing the cracks in your armor. About being human. It is also about the process and journey of overcoming those obstacles. We can all learn from each other when we share our stories of our weaknesses and our resilience.

“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.

When is the best time to write a letter to your grandchildren?

Right now.

Not later. Write now.

Life is very busy. You don’t have any time now. You have a young child at home. Work is crazy. You have bills to pay, laundry to do and there’s that streaming series that you just love and deserve to watch.

A natural assumption is that the best time to write your letter is when you retire from work. You’ll have both the time and the wisdom of being much older. However, there are several important reasons to start writing right away.

First is your memory. You are going to lose the accuracy of moment. If you write about something 30 years after it happened, you are going to lose much of the truth of the event. Dementia affects five to seven percent of the world’s population over 65.

Second is you do have the time. Any person can write for 30 minute a month. You can make that time. Thirty minutes a month is six hours a year. Multiply that by 40 years and you have 240 hours of writing.

Third is the size of the letter. Don’t think it has to be 1o0 pages. It can be just two! Don’t get overwhelmed. Anything is better than nothing. Kill the critics in your head. Just write two horrible pages. Re-write them two years from now and then make a few more changes ten years from now.

Finally, find your ‘why.’ You’re not writing because you don’t have a strong enough ‘why.’ Let me provide a few suggestions.

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin 

“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”
Tony Robbins

“You procrastinate on the most important things.”
Steven Pressfield

“Perfectionism can also be spelled paralysis.”
Winston Churchill

“Success is knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential and sowing seeds that benefit others.”
John C. Maxwell

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Greek Proverb

In reading a blog the other day, I came across a concept that sparked my imagination and really got me to thinking. That concept was an “Ethical Will.” The idea is that instead of leaving your descendants money or physical objects, you would leave them your best ideas on moral values and right conduct. Currently wills are all about money. Does anyone provide moral guidance? Which is more valuable? Would money or ethical guidance better stand the test of time? How would you provide an Ethical Will? What would it consist of? 

My thoughts led to maxims. A maxim is a rarely used term that means “A succinct formulation of a fundamental principle, general truth, or rule of conduct. A saying.” In other words – a good quote. I am all about brevity. Keep it short and sweet. Provide a very select, but very powerful collection of maxims that would provide the best help on a daily basis to your grandchildren and future descendants. Give them maxims that been helpful to you in your daily life. Thoughts that you remind yourself of when things get tough. Words that have help you get through hard times.

No one likes a long lecture. Not even people that love you. If you write a 200 page essay on the value of gratitude, the end result will probably be that they will be grateful they were able to get to the end and they will be grateful you didn’t write 300 pages. But if instead you leave them with the maxim – “A wise person does not grieve for the things they do not have, but rather rejoices for the things they do have” – then they will be grateful for your brevity and they will also understand quickly and easily an important thought you are giving to them in your Ethical Will.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford University where he talked about connecting the dots. He said that it is impossible to connect the dots looking forward in life. But it becomes very, very clear looking back at life.

When you write a letter to your grandchildren, you look back on your life and you can connect the dots. You can see clearly how one thing led to another and in the end it all made sense. Illustrate this with your grandchildren. Let them see how your decisions and fate led you from “A” to “B” to “C.” This will change their life view for the better.

This will help them understand that during their lives they will struggle to make sense of things at the time. Things won’t make sense. Circumstances will be hard. But, they will be fortified with the knowledge that one day in the future they can look back and make sense of it. This gives them hope during hard and frustrating times – when they really need it the most. 

Providing hope and understanding that hard, chaotic and painful times are temporary and ultimately they will make some kind of sense will provide real world help when they really need it most. Let them know that pain is temporary. That they need to keep going. Every painful experience provides lessons that help them down the road. Just keep going. Life makes sense looking back. Just keep climbing those mountains so you can reach the heights where looking back can reveal the path you had to take to get where you are now.

Tell them to trust the road. Give them faith in themselves and the process. This faith will provide them with critical self-confidence and a belief that they will ultimately find their way. These gifts could mean all the difference in their lives. Your letter has that power.

If you are like me, you will have some emotional valuable things in your house. Things that mean a lot to you not because they are worth a lot of money, but because they have great emotional value. For me each one of these has a story behind them. When writing your letter to your grandchildren you should tell the stories behind the objects because the stories say a lot about you.

I have an old Edison phonograph. It is one hundred years old and plays records without electricity. The story behind it is that my grandfather gave to my grandmother on their wedding day as a wedding present. But it also contains another story. The my father took the old dilapidated phonograph and completely refinished it. He took it all apart and put it back together so it worked perfectly. I helped him do that. To me it is a cherished family heirloom.

Another object I cherish is a ship model. It is a magnificent wooden model of the Sovereign of the Seas. It almost three feet long and three feet high. The craftsmanship in building this ship model is very evident in precise details down to the hand tied knots of all the rigging. The story behind this model is that my dad built it from a kit given to him as a retirement gift. It took him almost a year to build. My father had a tow hitch put on his car and rented a U-Haul to drive it 1,000 miles to my house. When my siblings asked why he built a model for me, he was compelled to spend ten more years making eight more ship models. Each one a different ship. 

I want my grandchildren to know the story behind these objects. They are much more than the things themselves. They are family history. They are heirlooms. Just like your letter can be.