What Happens After You Die
One question I wrestle with is “What happens after I die?” No, not in the metaphysical sense (though there is that), but in the estate planning and how will the people I’m close to who outlive me carry on in my absence senses.
Key to this is the question of how much control can and should one have from beyond the grave. When it comes to assets, for example, one can do everything from just leave them to others with no strings attached to put them in a trust with a mandate and a governing board with a smorgasbord of rules.
As for how people will carry on, there’s not much you can do. That’s troubling because how one decides to handle asset transfer depends on how the people stewarding those assets are likely to act. (And that’s true for giving it all away as well. Like families, not-for-profits are also complicated organizations full of people and who knows what the world’s most critical problems might be in the future?)
I believe pretty strongly that one’s overarching aim in life and work is to always be making one’s self obsolete. This means that others are learning what you do and then learning to do it better in such a way that you don’t have to do it anymore. If you do this well, then estate planning is easy. Leave everything with no strings attached and trust that others will do what you would have done – and perhaps better – if you hadn’t passed.
That’s quite the trust fall, though, and attorneys that I’ve mentioned the approach to think it’s crazy (acknowledging that they have an incentive to create complicated legal documents).
Yet I don’t know that I can top it. There are always unknown unknowns and unintended consequences. If I make a mistake designing a plan on the front end (and there’s a 100% chance that I will, given the circumstances), I can’t help fix it when I’m dead. All I can control is the effort I put in now to build relationships with the people around me, so maybe I should just do the best I can at that and the chips will fall where they fall.
Related to this is the observation that great businesses, after experiencing peak greatness when typically the founder is still in charge, seem to get less great the farther away in time they get from their founding and after the founder steps away. That’s weird because it seems like a great business should attract great people that would make the business greater. But approaches change over time and things are inevitably lost in hand-offs and transitions.
That would augur for lots of documentation and codification, and while that would make the lawyers happy, I don’t know that it’s a good answer either.
– By Tim Hanson