Month: June 2024

The best inheritance…

It is now two weeks after my father’s passing and I continue to look back at the lessons my dad taught me, as well as what we want to pass down to my children. In some podcasts I listen to, they talk about building ‘Generational Wealth.’ The goal, to build up enough assets to pass them down to your children. Building up an investment portfolio, real estate or business and leaving it to your heirs this gift is something that helps define success. There is a dopamine hit when you realize you can take care of someone once you are gone. Let us ignore the people who leave everything to their dogs. 

My dad and I discussed his will at length many times. He wanted to make sure certain people were taking care of after his death. Now that he has gone, I have noticed a few things that were not in his will that were more important than items in it. Now I get to reflect and see what he really passed down. 

In the hours after he passed there were a lot of decisions to be made, and with some of them they are no perfect answer. My sister and I were together and trying to figure it all out. She often said some of her thoughts aloud, and often I would agree or just give some other options and ideas. As we worked through decisions, I realized one of the best gifts he gave Heidi and me was the ability to discuss.  

We would talk things out without worrying about upsetting each other. We could bounce alternatives around and come to some options that we could execute. My sister and I have our share of differences, but we were able to just focus on the end goal. We both were thinking of what would be best for our mom, who was the most important person in my dad’s life. He would do anything for her, and she would for him. 

Another lesson I learned from my dad, and really both my parents, is watching a wonderful relationship until the end. I was fortunate to have some great relationships and it is because of the role models I had in them. My parents loved each other. Not to say they agreed all the time, but that was not the norm.  My dad did not want my mom to have to do anything. Even as ill as he was, he brought her breakfast in bed until he was no longer able. In wanting to do everything for each other, they also did not want to inconvenience the other.  

My mom had no patience in the ER, so my dad would let her stay at home and luckily my sister was around to take him. He really did not want my sister to be there also, but knew he needed help. It is something I took into my relationships also, caring about them is going beyond for them. In a good relationship giving effort is well effortless, and expecting nothing in return, in a great one your partner does the same for you. 

The other key thing that I inherited from my dad was the family name. As discussed heavily in last week’s post he had changed a lot and impacted many people. Most people who knew him or knew of him thought of him in a positive light. It is our duty to continue in that and try to leave this place just a little better than we found it.  

Generational Wealth in my family is more in the wealth of knowledge. It is knowing how to use your gifts you can impact people who may never know who you are, and the secret to a great relationship. These are things that no person, government, or entity can ever take from you. My dad has passed on the ability to have a great relationship with my siblings, my partner, and others. I hope I can pass these on to my children and it be treated as the best inheritance they could get.  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed.

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them.

Honoring my Dad..

One thing science has said often is that they are not wrong but instead they learned and changed their opinion. Two opinions I have often stated I had to rethink about over the last few days. Last week after a five-year absence I ran a volunteer event at the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. A full post about that will be coming.  If you are going to be involved in a charity that is if you pick one close to your heart, and your resources are directed at that single charity that you can make a bigger impact than spreading across too many. The second opinion is helping people who cannot do anything for you is a wonderful feeling. These thoughts are what drives me to volunteer and donate the the MSCH. 

This past week I had to think a lot about my dad. For those who do not know he passed away on June 9th, 2024. He was in the hospital for the last three days of his life and my mom, sister and I were by his side. After that were a few days of telling stories about him and remembering the remarkable things he accomplished. There are some stories I know, but when you connect the dots, you see what a genuinely great person my dad was, as well as why I am rethinking.  

My dad supported my mom in her endeavor in opening and running an adoption agency for handicapped and hard-to-place children. Being a lawyer he was able to bring cases and change the adoption laws in New Jersey. He successfully changed the law that single people could adopt as well as gay couples. These changes, while in the year 2024 may sound normal, in the 1970s they were not. Living under the shadow of being able to change something like that is a challenge that I do not think I could ever live up to.  

This hits my second opinion, where my dad was helping others that could not do anything in return. He seems to extend that a bit further, that he not only was helping some people directly, but he is helping others that he has never met. There are hundreds of people who will never know my dad, never know the original cases he brought to the courts whose lives are now changed due to his work. I was fortunate to see the smiles of the children I helped, he is now and will forever be watching thousands or millions of smiles that he was a part of. Bruce Lee said, ‘The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.’ My dad will have immortality, even if the people do not remember his name. 

Back to my first opinion about helping people. My dad had a strange business model as a Lawyer. He would take cases if he believed the person was right. He did not chase the financial part of the case; it was more about the purpose. Rumor has it, he never lost a case in court. I did ask him about this, and he continued to insist once a case went to trial, he never lost. He then would caveat it with he settled a larger percentage, so many never with to trial. But as good as he was at helping people his downside was his business sense. He often did not bill people or took whatever they offered to pay. He was the Bon Jovi Soul kitchen of Lawyers.  

I started to think about his direction differently. My dad was doing what many said they got in many different professions, this notion of wanting to help other people. My dad though did just that. It was not his side gig; it was not his volunteer passion, but his full-time job was helping people. Whether they could pay or not was not important to him but whether they were right and they needed help was the key. This was quite different to my opinion of working with one charity and you could have a greater impact. My dad wanted to help everyone, his belief that people were good drove him to want to help.  

My dad’s greatness as a person was in front of me all the time. My ability to see it as a child was not there, I just saw him as my dad and being a lawyer was something he did. There were no championships on TV, no channels dedicated to attorneys who do good, no post on social media chest pounding what he did. My dad just continued to help people, using his brain and his heart. It is a challenging thing to live up to. He managed to break my rule of only focusing on one, while not only tackling helping others who cannot do anything for you and extending it to helping others who will never know who you were.  

He will always be able to smile as he has proved to be the most successful person I know. I will miss you dad. Happy Father’s Day.  Along with my regular disclaimer below, please go help someone who will never know who you are.

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. The fundraising site had to be restarted and NYP Hospital made changes to their donation sites. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  You are welcome to comment, but note it is moderated and all spam will be removed.

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images without notes are created using an AI tool that allows me to reuse them.

Lessons I know my Daughter Learned as She Graduated.

As a parent you watch your children go through various milestones in their lives. I had the honor of watching my eldest daughter graduate from Villanova recently, and no matter how you prepare for it, you end up with a wave of emotions. What is visible is an incredibly happy person walking across the stage, but what is not visible is the effort it took them to get there.  

I joke about how much money I will save, but there is something less tangible that happens with each step my children take. It parallels employees that have worked for me. I leveraged often lessons as a manager to parent, as well as parenting to manage. As managers the closest you get to a milestone like this is a promotion, but it is not the same. But there are clear smaller steps and lessons you hope remain with them. As I come back to continuously edit this post, I may make this into a mini-series like the one on team building. 

The first week of each year I layout the expectations I have of them (from my team buidling blog series). One of those is to seek help when needed.  This is also something I stress on my kids. One of the hardest things to do is not to help them but allow them to step out and ask for help from teachers, other students, even a tutor. Help is only useful if done the right way. If a parent authors the essay for a child, the child may get a good grade, but the long term of teaching is lost. If every time someone comes to you, and in frustration you just do it yourself, the person will learn not to do work, that you will do it for them. There is this notion of the right way. 

In the movie Finding Forrester there is a scene where Forrestor has the teen Jamal start typing the first sentence or two of one of his old articles and says the rhythm of typing will often get you started. I have not done this to write but use this technique often. I will ask open ended questions to get my kids to produce an answer to get them started. When developers are stuck with a production issue, I give them hints to look at, often a stackoverflow section to peruse to help them get started. The key is to stir the mind into thinking and learning the process.  

I learned this technique by accident. In High School, a friend of mine struggled in Physics. You need to take yourself back to a time when Khan Academy did not exist, the world wide web did not exist, so help was more a phone call to someone you knew. I would get a call, and my friend would say ‘Could you help me?’ My first response was often ‘Read me the problem you are working on.’ While he was reading it, I would stop at certain points asking him to break down what he just read, and what formula or concept that part had. To me it was a stalling technique, as by now I knew I was going to get the call nightly and stopped bringing my book home knowing my friend would read me the problems and I could just do the homework as he read it to me. The book was heavy. 

As I questioned him and he started to answer, he was able to learn what he was doing. I could have just given him the answers, but my friend did not want that. He was more interested in learning. This was the first time I was ever tutoring someone, and it is an insight that I still leverage today. It is the classic story of giving someone a fish versus teaching them to fish. As a parent or a manager, the goal should always be teaching them to fish when possible. There are situations where doing something is needed, and wisdom teaches you when.  

Back to my daughter as one of her last projects was in a circuits class. This is not in her sweet spot, and the teacher happens to be someone I know. The final project was to create a service in azure to receive data from a pulse oximeter they built in the class already. I could have easily leveraged my account and put something up in seconds. Instead, I gave her a link to a good tutorial including a video on how to do it and let her do it herself. She will never need this again in her life, but the reinforcing that when it is something I believe she can do, she can ask for help, and the help I will give is guidance not doing it for her is one lesson I hope she carries throughout her life. 

There is the other side to what to do when someone asks for help, but that can be saved for another time.  

This opinion is mine, and mine only, my current or former employers have nothing to do with it. I do not write for any financial gain; I do not take advertising and any product company listed was not done for payment. But if you do like what I write you can donate to the charity I support (with my wife who passed away in 2017) Morgan Stanley’s Children’s Hospital or donate to your favorite charity. I pay to host my site out of my own pocket, my intention is to keep it free.  I do read all feedback; but it is moderated. 

This Blog is a labor of love and was originally going to be a book. With the advent of being able to publish yourself on the web I chose this path. I will write many of these and not worry too much about grammar or spelling (I will try to come back later and fix it) but focus on content. I apologize in advance for my ADD as often topics may flip. I hope one day to turn this into a book and or a podcast, but for now it will remain a blog.  AI is not used in this writing other than using the web to find information. Images were taken by me.

© 2025 LrAu

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑