Write Like Your Grandchildren Are Reading

Among the papers my father left behind, the ledgers were not the only books. There were letters to his brothers and to the town union, drafts he never sent, and in the margins of his record books, occasional sentences that were not arithmetic at all. "Sold at a loss to keep my word to Baba E. The word is worth more." One line, forty years old, and it has governed transactions he could never have imagined.

That is when I understood something that now shapes how I spend my evenings: companies can be inherited. Judgment cannot, unless it is written down.

The fortune that evaporates

Our continent is full of first-generation fortunes that died with their founders, and we usually tell that story as a story about money: bad wills, family quarrels, taxes, waste. But I have sat close enough to several of these collapses to know the real sequence. The money did not leave first. The reasoning left first. The founder carried thirty years of judgment entirely in his head: why this partner and never that one, why we keep cash in that season, why we never touch that business however sweet it looks. When the head was buried, the heirs inherited the assets and none of the operating system. The estate was a library after the fire: shelves intact, books gone.

The will transfers ownership. Only writing transfers judgment.

What you do not write down dies twice: once with you, and again in the mistakes of those who inherit your assets without your reasons.

What I write, and why

Decision memos, before the outcome arrives

For every major decision across our companies, I write, or require, a short memo before the result is known: what we decided, what we believed at the time, what would prove us wrong. Hindsight is a flatterer; it rewrites every story so that we always knew. The memo is the witness that cannot be bribed. Reading my own memos from a decade ago is a regular humiliation and the cheapest education I receive.

A journal nobody will see, so that some of it can matter to people I will never meet

Most pages are ordinary. But scattered through them is the raw material of everything I now publish: the actual fear before a signing, the actual anger after a betrayal, what actually worked. Public writing without a private record becomes performance. The journal keeps the public pages honest.

Essays like this one, published where my comfort would prefer privacy

Why publish at all? A man in my position gains little from exposure; the private version of these lessons would serve my companies fine. I publish because the letters that helped me most were written by men who owed me nothing: authors, elders, builders long dead, men who chose to leave the lights on for strangers. Somewhere there is a young Nigerian with more vision than capital, drowning quietly in his first company's chaos. I cannot fund all of them. I can leave lights on.

The standard that changes the sentence

And so to the title. When I sit down to write a memo, a journal entry, or these essays, I apply one standard, and it changes every sentence: write as if your grandchildren are reading. Not because they will read every page, but because the standard does two things at once.

• It forbids performance. You cannot posture for a reader who will know how it all turned out. Grandchildren are the one audience you cannot impress with a version of events. So you write the true thing, or nothing.
• It forces generosity. A note to yourself can be lazy. A letter across fifty years must explain its terms, confess its doubts, and say what it actually meant. It must, in other words, be useful to someone who cannot ask you follow-up questions, which is, eventually, every reader you will ever have.

This website is, in the end, that carton of my father's books, rebuilt in public. Ledgers and margins. The arithmetic of what I did, and the sentences about why. If you build anything, a company, a family, a name, I ask you to start tonight, with one page: what you decided this year, and what you believed when you decided it.

Your grandchildren cannot inherit your mind. But they can inherit your pages. Write them.