Building Wealth is Only Half of Your Family’s Legacy

The Starting Point: Finding Your Northstar as Family

Extraordinary Organizations have a clear mission, vision, goals, and purpose; the same is true of Extraordinary Families. The Family Compass is a tool I designed to help Extraordinary Families identify these same things for themselves, promoting a shared sense of responsibility for living up to what it means to be part of your unique family.

Your family’s mission and vision is a representation of the principles your family lives by, what defines you as a family, and what you want to do together—including what you share as a family BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).

• Wenner Family Vision: Every generation making a 100x impact.
• Wenner Family Mission: Lead with love and intentional action to light up the world.
• Wenner Family BHAG: Create 1,000 extraordinary days in 100 different places before Donny 
  goes to college, starting May 30, 2022.

The North Star to your Family Compass are your family values. Here are ours.

BE A LIGHT

• Be Present: Enjoy the moment with an attitude of gratitude.
• Authentic: Maintain and display humble confidence. Be honest and transparent at all times.
• Live Fully: We strive to maximize each day and the blessings the Lord has provided to us across the 8F's of life.
• Impact: We give our time, our talent, and our treasures generously.
• Grit & Growth: Passion and perseverance towards long term goals with curiosity and desire to grow.
• Honor God: Through servant leadership to the Lord, family, and at work.
• Tribe: Build thriving relationships through our relationship with the Lord.

If you haven’t gone through the exercise of creating a Family Compass, there’s no time like the present. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete in the first go, but it will force some important (and I’ll be honest, likely difficult) conversations that need to be had. Be open and welcome the opportunity to deepen your connection as a family.

Extraordinary Families Spend Intentional Time Together 

If you’re a longtime reader of Don’s Thoughts, you know that I often remind parents that the #1 regret of busy professionals is that they did not spend more time with their children. At the same time, I want to point out an important distinction: presence isn’t the same as intentionality.

We need to intentionally invest in our family, doing things that help us grow both independently and together, strengthening our relationships along the way. A lot of that starts with learning about each other. What are everyone’s passions, dreams, and aspirations? What do they love that you want to help them make time for and what makes them feel loved so that you can love them best?

Not everyone knows what their dreams and passions are and that’s part of the process; spending dedicated time to support each other in figuring out what that looks like. I remember the first time, inspired by my mentor Lloyd Reeb, that I asked Carla what her dream was. She didn’t know; and what a blessing it turned out to be to go on the journey alongside her as she figured it out. It not only gave us a reason to spend intentional time together, but it gave me a chance to understand her more, even after years of marriage. That’s the blessing of intentional time over presence. 

How Habits Drive Intentionality & Inform Legacy

One of the best ways to be intentional about something is to make it a habit. In his great book Habits of the Household, Justin Whitmel Earley introduced the concept of keystone habits, which are bigger habits which naturally breed smaller habits through a ripple effect.

One of the biggest themes of Earley’s book is that we become our habits and our kids become us. That’s really something to think about. Your children, even the teenagers that act like they’ve outgrown being around you, are looking to you at all times to learn what it means to be a good person.

Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6 

In our family, we have daily, weekly, and monthly keystone habits that help us be intentional about living out our values, stay aligned with our family vision and mission, and make space for each of us to feel supported in pursuing our personal passions, goals, and dreams.  More importantly, they set in motion the legacy we want to leave behind, modeling for our children what a life well lived looks like.

I went much deeper on this in the recent Building an Extraordinary Family webinar—which is a great way to introduce the concepts I’m sharing here with your spouse and even your children—but I want to share a few highlights with you here.

Daily Keystone Habits

I start each day with morning keystone habits, taking care of myself and my relationship with God so that I can spend the rest of the day doing what’s most important to me: taking care of others. This includes pursuing my calling of transforming lives through the work I do at DLP and also doing the work to be remembered as an extraordinary father and husband who was most famous in my own home. 

“The difference between people who happen to live together and families who befriend each other are rhythms of conversation at mealtimes.”
Justin Whitmel Earley

One of the most important daily keystone habits we have as a family is eating dinner together. It’s not always a Normal Rockwall painting; some nights we’re grabbing something on the way home from basketball or violin practice, but the important part is that we’re together. We pray together and then we take turns answering a few questions about our day. 
 

Weekly Keystone Habits

We have a weekly rhythm of Sabbath from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. This time is all about having fun with the people we love.

We focus on:

• No work or 1-on-1 screen time (and limiting screen time, period.)
• Attending church together
• Finding time (even if it’s just 20 minutes) to spend 1-on-1 time with each child

Carla and I have gone through periods of days, weeks, and even months where we don’t allow screen time at all. Our children become different children entirely. They’re more creative and patient, and they spend more time outdoors and with one another.

You will never hear me say this is easy: it isn’t, but I strongly believe it’s one of the most important battlegrounds of modern parenthood.  
 

Monthly Keystone Habits 

One of the most important ways to build an extraordinary family is to show your children that you love and cherish your spouse. This is the single most important thing you can do to raise children who not only value and cherish others, but who come back and visit once they’ve left your home and started their own families.

Spending intentional time together, just the two of us without the boys, is one of our monthly keystone habits that models just how important this relationship is in our home. We have a minimum of two date nights (or lunches, which are often easier) where we focus just on each other. Not on being parents, not on our family calendar, not on challenges with the children, but on nurturing our relationship as Don and Carla.

As a family, we also do monthly meetings where we share lessons, reinforce family values, guide the heart, and bring everyone together as our family matures and grows together.

Quarterly & Annual Keystone Habits

We also have one overnight trip each quarter that just Carla and I go on, as well as an annual boys trip that always becomes the highlight of any given year. At the end of each year, we also have a family celebration where we look back at our favorite days of the year, talk about the ways we made an impact as a family, and talk about our goals for the year ahead. It’s evolved as the kids have grown, but it’s always one of the days we look forward to the most.

Wealth can transfer. Character has to be built.

The biggest takeaway I want you to have is this: true legacy comes not from financial inheritance, but from what the life we live sets in motion for future generations. To truly raise children to be successful adults who are living lives of significance, I believe there are 9 things that every parent needs to account for.

1. Struggle
2. Safety and Security
3. Stories of Vulnerability
4. Scripture
5. Sports
6. Sabbath
7. Serving
8. Salvation
9. Systemic Giving

I talk about each of these on the Building an Extraordinary Family webinar, but I want to focus on one in particular here: struggle. Of the 9 S’s, this is the one that I always find shocks some people—especially because I often introduce it by saying that wealthy, successful people often rob their children of struggle.

It sounds counterintuitive; shouldn’t all parents shield their children from struggle, especially those with the financial resources to do so?

But here’s what I mean. Without your own drive, determination, and certainly some struggles along the way, you wouldn’t be building a financial legacy for your children to one day inherit. Yet, paradoxically, wealth often removes drive from future generations. The more you’re able to create a world where you can give your child anything they desire—removing the necessity for them to figure it out or pay for it on their own—the harder it is not to. When you rob them of the struggle, you strip them of the drive it takes to be successful.

Carla and I long ago decided we want to create a financial legacy for our children where they’re enabled to do anything, but not nothing. We want to help each boy pursue their passions and strengths, but we are intentional about the struggles we remove and those we let them face. 

What John C. Maxwell Taught Me About Navigating Success—Successfully

Many of us spend our life chasing success, but what we’re often not prepared for are the vulnerabilities it brings. Power corrupts, applause intoxicates, and success isolates—and that’s only some of the danger.

We’ve all seen it, whether it dominated headlines or happened to someone we know personally. A leader builds something remarkable and then slowly (or not so slowly), it unravels. Not because their strategy or approach was wrong, but because they lost their footing.

Left unchecked, success doesn’t automatically improve your life; in fact, it can destroy it. It’s something I’ve been keenly aware of for the 20 years I’ve been blessed to build this company. DLP has made thirteen consecutive Inc. 5000 lists, housed thousands of families, and helped thousands of investors build a path to financial freedom. The question I ask myself the most isn’t, “how do I keep building this?” It’s “how can I stay grounded as I do?”

Earlier this year I had the privilege of introducing my friend and mentor John C. Maxwell at an intimate gathering of my 100x cohort. He shared a framework he’s been developing for the better part of his career that he calls “success stabilizers.” The concept is simple. Every form of success carries with it a corresponding vulnerability. And for every vulnerability, there is a specific discipline that acts as a counterweight.

Maxwell shared that he began focusing on this concept in his mid-thirties, at a time when things were going very well. His church was influential, he was in the first class of the Amazon Hall of Fame for authors, and he was starting to get some recognition. At the same time, he started to see successful friends of his mess their lives up completely.

In his characteristic candor he shared that he started to think, “This could happen to me—I better figure this out.” Not everyone climbing to the level of success Maxwell had ascended to has that humility or focus on self-reflection. We tend to believe that our intentions will protect us; that because we know better, we’ll do better. But intention without structure isn’t enough and the more successful you become, the more consequential that gap becomes—for your organization, for yourself, and for your family.

Living my life as a steward—for investors, for team members, for those we provide housing to, and for my family—I feel the pressure of those stakes everyday. My ability to stay grounded as a leader is non-negotiable and whether you’ve come to terms with it yet or not, the same is true for you. 

The success stabilizers Maxwell identified are the key. I can’t give them all to you—you’ll have to wait for the book to come out—but I’ll share some of the ones that stayed with me the most.

The stabilizer for power is accountability. 
Successful people are powerful people. As John reminded the room, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely isn’t a cliche, it’s a fact. The counterbalance? Accountability. Surround yourself with people in your life who not only have your permission to challenge you, but who care enough to do so.

Accountability closes the gap between our intentions and our actions. A trusted inner circle that will keep you grounded, ask you the questions you’d rather not answer, and point out when you’re straying from who they know you to be. Be clear on who these people are for you, nurture your relationships with them, and listen to them—especially when it’s uncomfortable, because often it’s what’s hard to hear that you need to hear the most.

The stabilizer for money is generosity. 
Wealth is one of the clearest tests of character there is. John put it this way: You show me a generous person, and I’ll show you a person that money doesn’t own. You show me a person that’s not generous, I’ll show you a person that money owns.

He issued a challenge to the room: pick a number. Not a vague aspiration, but an actual figure: what do you need to live well? What net worth is genuinely enough? Because without a number, John says, the finish line keeps moving. Greed doesn’t announce itself; it just quietly raises the threshold.

When John picked his number more than a decade ago, something shifted. Every year, anything that would increase his net worth beyond it, he gave away. That’s the kind of generosity that stabilizes wealth.

At DLP, generosity is not a line item, it’s our foundation. We invest in attainable housing, we build Thriving Communities, we invest intentionally in our team members and their family because we are committed to transforming lives.

The stabilizer for ego is awareness.
When you’re successful, it’s not uncommon for people to tell you that you’re amazing—not just sometimes, but often. If you let it, constant applause and adulation can do serious damage to judgment.

John described a mentor that sat him down once for a three-hour lunch in his mid-thirties and said something that was an instant stabilizer for him: “You’re not amazing. The gifts God has given you are amazing.”

As leaders, we all have our own God-given gifts. When people are applauding us, they are applauding what God gave us, not what we made. And if you confuse the two, you’ll start believing you’re something you aren’t. 

“Applause is intoxicating, but awareness is very sobering.”
John C. Maxwell

John also shared a personal story about leading a roundtable where he wasn’t on his A game, and three of his team members told him so. He disagreed with them in the moment, but by the time he got home, he knew they were right. He called the event organizer, apologized directly, and then called every participant to apologize as well.

Awareness isn’t primarily about knowing your strengths. It’s about knowing the truth, including the unflattering parts of it. That self-awareness is what keeps applause from becoming delusion.

The stabilizer for being put on a pedestal is serving. 
When you’re successful, people often put you on a pedestal. People will start to treat you differently. They’ll hold back criticism, defer to you in most (if not all) situations, and hold back from being their authentic self. All of that, Maxwell says, is a trap.

The stabilizer is embracing “I serve” over “I deserve.” In his world, he doesn’t use titles, doesn’t need a corner office or a reserved parking space. Not as a performance of humility, but because those things have nothing to do with how well—or why—he leads. He deliberately stays close to the people he’s leading, closing the gap, not maintaining or widening it.

Servant leadership is one of our core values at DLP and it’s not theoretical, it’s structural. The leaders here who stay closest to the work, who stay genuinely curious about what their team needs, who never confuse their title with their worth—those are the leaders who consistently make the best decisions when it matters the most.  

Wenner Family BHAG Update

One of our most recent extraordinary days was spending our first full day in Paris, seeing the Eiffel Tower. Donny also launched his around the world basketball passion project.