652: How Your Business Becomes A Legacy: Write Things Down

For the last 9 years, my two sons and I have made a pilgrimage to Camp Ridgecrest in Black Mountain, NC for the annual father/son weekend camp.  A weekend marked by meaning, muscular pain, intentionality, and ibuprofen, this time may be the most momentous in our relationship as dad and sons.  The regularity, frequency, and repetition of daily life is wildly important, of course, and these dedicated moments of focused intentionality have bred special awareness. This year was different for two reasons. Both of my sons are now living away from home, each maneuvering through their own experience outside of the daily, in-person interaction of mom or dad.  Both were working as staff members of father/son camp for the weekend while I was able to participate as a volunteer cleaning floors and watching dads walk with their sons to play frisbee golf, hike through hornet's nests, and most meaningfully, sit and read what they had written. There is a tradition that has been manufactured through premeditated repetition; if a dad is not careful, he will miss it and so too his son(s). The second uniqueness of this year’s father/son camp is that a key leader and influencer of the day to day function of camp lost his father suddenly this past year.  What may customarily be a localized and isolated experience impacting only this leader, his family, and a few close friends; this year, every participant at father/son camp was impacted without most being aware. A hallmark of father/son camp happens each year on Saturday morning when a couple of hundred boys and teenagers are ushered away from their dads to go lose themselves in jovial amusement for an hour or so.  During the hysteria of boy fun, not yet even laced with an ounce of Mellow Yellow or Sour Patch Straws, the dads are invited into a complementary experience. For years, Mike Pineda wrote. Every single morning, Mike’s family would wake up to an email in their inbox.  These daily emails became a stalwart foundation for anyone who made the time to read them.  Periodically, one of these emails would “leak” and those of us nearby would feel the coolness of wisdom blow to influence the direction of our day and our thoughts.  I never met Mike in person, and yet Mike has a significant influence on our decision-making, our thoughts, and our parenting.   Why? Mike wrote. Mike was not a New York Times Bestseller, nor a Pulitzer Prize nominee.  Mike was a husband, a dad, and a friend, just like many of us.  Mike made time to write so that the meaning of his thoughts could slow-release into the narrow scope of his influence.  Mike’s son now oversees the camp where hundreds of dads are invited on a Saturday morning once a year…to write. Each dad was provided with a piece of letterhead, a pen, and a beautiful place spread out to be alone.  Writing requires time;  time to think, time to reflect, time to go after wisdom, and time to get all of those thoughts down on a piece of paper so that the echo of their minds rings through the peaks and valleys of life's realities.  These dads write so their sons can see and hear what they really want to say in a way that leverages the value of thought and contemplation.  Saturday night, each dad walks under the night sky with his son(s) to a place prepared by quiet and clandestine volunteers with a small firepot and a couple of chairs.  With limited distraction locked on the shimmering tongues of small flames, each dad sits with his son(s) and his letter(s).   The son sits as a recipient, the dad as the giver.  Dad reads because dad wrote.   I’m not even sure it was Mike’s pattern of writing that stoked the need for dads to write letters to their sons each year at camp; but I believe the continuation and longevity of this important rite has been, in part, perpetuated because of Mike’s precedent. In business and leadership, we obsess about the power of writing things down because of the down-stream value of replicable systems and processes.  We push you to write because it unlocks the freedom of your team to run. Now stocked with the deliberate wisdom of dads and granddads at father/son camp, sons all over can run with the freedom of knowing what their dad has to say about life; and more importantly about their son.   Mike made time to write so that we could see, hear, and run.