How the Wealthiest Families Teach Their Kids About Money! Do This to Unlock Abundance!

We either learn to master money or it will master us. So it starts with an understanding where money is never my identity, good or bad. Scott Donald, welcome.

Founder of Gravy Stack and the author.

Of Value Creation Kids.

Scott Donald.

If you have an abundance mindset, you're able to see even hard things as opportunities in disguise.

As blessings.

As blessings. The hardest things in my past. I'm talking hard, gut-wrenching, near bankruptcy, miscarriage, death. I could either say, screw you to the world for this, or I can say, what am I to learn here? And how can this be of service to others?

Wow.

So you want to the number one strategy of the top 100 families in the world?

Yes.

Okay. It's teach your kids to create value first, not money.

How can someone start to reprogram their psychology or mindset in order to develop something healthy around their values?

Yeah.

So they can teach that to people in their family.

An easy way. Really? Legacy is raising children and grandchildren to blow by you in every way.

Wow.

That is the true hack for all financial competency. What is money? Let's get into this.

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Good to be here, Louis.

Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. There's something that I'm interested that you have, Don, that I mentioned in learning about. You studied over 100 multi-generational high net worth families for over a decade.

Yep.

And you studied what works, what doesn't work, how they build their wealth, what they do with their wealth after they die, how they pass on the lessons or the money to the family after their legacy is over or when they move on. What are the strategies that these 100 high net worth families have? The three things they all have in common that keep them in peace with the money they're making and have good relationships with their family and their kids to make sure that money doesn't ruin their lives.

Yeah, well, that's the first thing. They have a correct view of what money actually is.

What is money?

But let me back up for two seconds because I'm not just studying the richest families in the world. Half of our families were the richest or were on track to become, well, extremely wealthy, who gave, who were generous, who stewarded it well for their family's investment. So one of the main things I want everyone to hear is like, one of the biggest things I learned with the best families in the world is that they believed in heritage, over inheritance.

What's the difference?

Well, inheritance is just leaving them stuff, leaving them money. This is what the whole financial world is trying to get you to think. Your job is to die with assets to take care of them. That's what you should define as love. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. 90% of generational wealth transfer gone by the grandkids.

Really?

Gone. What people don't study 'Cause I'm a 7 million family, this is my world. I wanted to know what was underneath that. Okay, what happens if you just pass on a bunch of money and assets and homes and stuff 'cause you love your kids and you wanna take care of your grandkids?

What happens if you pass on money to kids or grandkids that don't understand money?

That's right. If they don't understand it, you get a whole host of nightmares. Mental health, imposter syndrome, I didn't earn this, I know I didn't earn this, lottery ticket. Why does everyone that wins lotteries go crazy and go broke? They end up giving it all or in bad investments. They don't know how to manage it. They don't know how to create value in the world. They don't have the right relationship to it. And then there's mental health, violence, addiction, estrangement of kids. So many breaks in relationships, divorce, destruction, rampant.

Because of money.

Because of the money and the stuff. Or at worst, they're just waiting for their parents to go. Oh, like how many people, like it's very hard for people to admit this, but even if you're doing well and then you're dealing with assets of an older family member, you're just for the last 10 to 15 years of their life, you're thinking about it a lot. You're consumed by it.

What, like when they're gonna go so you can get their stuff?

Yeah, so then they stop risking.

'Cause they know eventually they're gonna get this.

You stop creating value. you don't take that chance, you don't build that new thing, you don't start that company, like, I'm gonna wait for the pay. I got a big, I'm in this boat in a way right now. I've got a big payout coming at the end of the year. Really? From an exit of a company three years ago, like the last 5% is hidden at the end of the year, and it's a guaranteed, you know, Big check. And I'm looking at it like, and I'm teaching this and learning this from these families, and I'm unpacking and realizing that at least once a week, I'm.

Like, yeah, but that's coming. I don't have to work as hard. I don't have to add value here.

I don't have to take that chance. I don't have to create that value. I don't have to dive into learning this thing. I'll do that after this. That'll give me all the freedom and peace to do it.

Give me cushion.

The same entitlement mentality.

Wow.

So inheritance has a lot of inherent problems. But if you focus on heritage, which to me is a last name that means something, the values of the family, It's the mindsets, the skill sets, what we care about as a family. Right? When somebody hears the Hou's name in the world, what's the smell? What does it remind them of?

It's the feeling.

That's it.

What's the essence?

Yeah, the Danish have a term called hygge. It's the feeling you get when you walk in someone's house. That's the smell of their family, the scent. Hugue to me is heritage. So I believe families need to work on heritage instead of inheritance. If you get heritage right and you're training them up the right way, then really the inheritance is less of an issue. You can still leave some. I'm not like tough love, let them scrape. I'm not that guy.

Give them zero.

I'm not that guy, but there's a process for this. There's a difference between an I love you gift and a coasting gift.

What's the difference?

The moment it kills their desire to create more value in the world, you've moved from I love you to coasting. And the bigger problem is that when you have multiple children, one of them might be a high earner. Like if my parents died and left me tons and tons of cash, at this point, I am financially competent enough. Six businesses, millions of customers, thousands of employees. I know what to do to steward it well. And it's not gonna ruin my identity. I'm not gonna say who, but other family members, cousins, other people, if they got the same amount of money, would crush them. Really?

Yeah.

They all want it.

What happens to someone psychologically when they are given a large sum of money that they have not earned, and it's too large for them to really steward? in a healthy way. What happens psychologically to a human being when you win a lottery that's too big for you to understand and comprehend too much money or you're passed down an inheritance that is too big.

Yeah, well, it's like a participation trophy on steroids. So this is why if you're not prepared for the blessing, for the reward.

Yes.

You know, there's this verse in the Bible okay? I don't want to get too Jesus on you, but there's a verse in the Bible that says God's not going to give you more than you can handle. I actually believe that that's, that's not pain and trials. I think that that has to do with blessing and reward. See, what I think is God actually helps us through the hard stuff, like the, the hard and the trials of life. I call them healthy struggles. Okay, our book, Value Creation Kid, the Healthy Struggles yous Children Need to Succeed. That's the point. When you go through healthy struggles, right? Things that grow you, you're refined. You learn how to create value. You learn humility and empathy and strength and inner confidence. Yes. Not, Hey, Louis, you're pretty, you're smart, you're nice. No, no, inner confidence. What does our friend Alex say? He's like, you don't get confident by chanting incantations in the mirror, but by having an undeniable stack of accomplishments to get to.

Evidence and proof.

Things you've overcome. So I actually think that that has to do with, God's not gonna give you more blessing than you can handle, more stuff, more opportunity. Because I think if people get there without the journey, without the value creation journey, ruins them. Like, this is how you actually lose faith. This is how you think you can do it all your own. This is where you get imposter syndrome. This is where you get like fear, anxiety, or greed misplaced, right? This is all the bad stuff happens.

I don't mean all that stuff.

But if you've gone through that journey, you're refined, you're prepared.

So how do we prepare for the blessings of more money then?

I think it starts with training up our children. This is my world, man. Like true value creation for our kids is the game. So we have this thing called the home economy system. We could unpack how I got here if you want me to, but I think allowance is socialism.

Okay.

I know that comment right there is gonna get you thousands of pissed off people. But can I unpack that for a minute? Please. What's the- and even chores. Like if you just do allowance for chores, it doesn't work. and let me explain.

Why is allowance for chores or automatic allowance every week a bad thing for kids?

Because allowance is codependency and it's tied in our studies to a lack of motivation and an aversion to work. If you teach children that they get the same amount of money every week just for existing or putting in the bare minimum, or putting in the time and effort, you got a problem.

Interesting. You're gonna raise in value.

It's not creating value. That's right. What is money? Let's get into this. What is money? Money is not good. It's not bad. That's what people think. Money is amazing. You should focus on it. Well, that's a keeping up with the Joneses identity trauma waiting to happen. If they say it's bad, that's a poverty mindset. The Bible does not say money is bad. It says the love of money, the idol of money. Money is neither good or bad. Money is a tool. that makes you more of what you already are. It is a store of value.

A store of value. What does that mean?

It's a store of value that's created. So when we teach kids and families at our dinner table program, we literally say, create value first. So you want to the number one strategy of the top 100 families in the world. Yes. Okay. It's teach your kids to create value first, not money. Because money is a store of value. You have to go back to first principles. If you focus on value creation, material value, what you create and produce in the world, solving problems, financial reward is the reward of that. Emotional value, good friendships, how you think, how you feel, spiritual value, how you love, how you live, mindset, lifting me lifting you up above your issues to a higher calling. to God, getting out of your ego and like that's spiritual value. So if we can teach our children, hey, we're gonna be value hunters in this home. That is the number one greatest asset you could ever give them. It's an unfair advantage for the rest of their life. And what you don't do is you focus on the money side.

So you don't talk about the money.

The money comes as a result of value creation. So back to the allowance.

So the reward.

Allowance teaches them nothing about creating value for money. And then what parents do is they say, well, my kids do a list of chores and I give them an allowance.

Okay, so now that's value because they're helping out around the house or they're contributing.

But the problem there is that half those chores, you should never tie to money. You should never pay your kids to make their bed and clean their room, do the dishes and trash, homework.

That should be just a way of living.

That's the role in the family.

Yeah, that's what we do.

We call those expectations.

Yes, standards.

So that's why chores doesn't work at the first part. The other half of those chores should be a menu of ways to earn, and it should be unlimited. Okay? And then, so we call those gigs. So this could be a list on.

The fridge or wherever that says, here's 100 gigs.

Or make it up.

Or make it up.

Go find ways to create value. I'll tell you how much that's worth for me. And that is the winner for every single family. The moment your kid starts hunting for ways to create value at home or in the neighborhood, we call those community gigs. Now they're going out and having a lens to see the world, not what I can get, but how I can create value for others. That is the true hack for all financial competency.

What are the three most valuable gigs that you have at your home that your kid, that you ever gave to your kids or they gave to you and you said, yeah, I'm willing to pay more for that.

Yeah, we're at a point now they have about a dozen gigs that are on the list. And we, our system, the dinner table program. You literally get a printout for the fridge. It's auto repeating. You can pay your kids every week. It's a payday. But remember, we have expectations.

We have gigs, but we have expectations.

Expectations are separate. That's free.

You don't get, you don't get- It's table stakes.

You don't get paid for showing up and living a standard of excellence. That's right. But the gigs, we break them up. So there's action gigs and there's brain gigs. What's the action gig? Action gigs are kind of what you might think of some chores. Like sweep the garage, wash a window. something in the yard, clean a bathroom, make a meal. Brain gigs are my favorite part.

Read a book and give me a report on it.

Yep. Podcasts, TED Talks. This one right here, kids, parents should be like offering up $4 if their kids tell their parents three things they learned from this and one thing they're gonna apply to their life. We call those brain gigs. No sugar for a week. I am statements every single day for a month.

Interesting.

These shouldn't be tied to value 'cause it's creating value with your brain. You and I, our whole life is creating value with our brain. Way more than our hands and feet. Why are we not teaching that to children? Homework is an expectation. But there should be a ton of brain gigs. So my three favorite, I'll give you my three favorite, and we automate these in our app, okay? Subscription hunt. What if you had your kids- Save me money. What if your kids go cancel? All the subscriptions that you forgot you were paying for, and they hunt and find them and you're giving them a cut.

Yeah.

What a brilliant brain gig. Couponing. The average family in our system, the kids and the teenagers starting as young as six years old are saving them 26% on groceries.

Wow.

By learning to find the four ways we teach them to get coupons.

And they get a cut of the savings.

They get a savings cut. It's all automated. And then plan the next family trip. What if your kids, what if your 10-year-old planned the entire, my seven-year-old's doing it right now. What if they got three flights, three hotels, or VRBO, or Turo, Uber, rental car, and got the best deal? Where are we gonna eat? What are we gonna do? They will save you a grand. I guarantee you they will save you a grand and they will love that trip. They will own that trip and remember for the rest of their life. and then free you up so much time.

Interesting.

Yeah, see our whole system, our job was how do we teach financial competencies and money without the trauma and with a deeper relationship as an end result with the family.

Right.

Because what I just explained to you has no more conflict over chores. Kids never ask for money and stuff again.

Because they know if I want money, I got to do one of these things.

I know where to go. I have power.

It's unlimited.

It's unlimited. See, and now here's the trick. The third E, we have expectations, extra pay, and then expenses. This is where every parent goes wrong. They think that the way to buy love, no, they don't even realize it's buying love, but it is.

Buying gifts and giving them money.

They pay for everything. They think it's their way to love their kids. So they buy everything that we have a list. They're like, if you start passing off expenses, Now you give your kids a motive, an intrinsic motivation to earn and create value for gigs. No more conflict. So these are like toys, starts with toys and games and trinkets. And if they any sport they do, have them pay for something like the basketball or the cleats. Have them be in charge of skin in the game. Skin in the game. Social outings with friends. My favorite one, birthday presents for your kids parties that they go to. My seven-year-old Reagan, A couple weeks ago, she was the only kid that went to the Ninja Gym party. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's the only kid at the party that bought the present. 'Cause we told her, it's on her list on the fridge. She knew ahead of time. We didn't have to tell her. She knew. She had to make the 12 bucks after save and invest and share. She knew she had to get this present, so she planned ahead. She grabs the present, she puts it in the little bin with tissue and signs, Reagan. She's seven, dude. We go to the party. Every other kid just chucks it on the table. Their parents buy them. Anyone listening with kids, we've done this, everyone does this. The kids do not learn generosity with any of that. They didn't even open the presents at the party. But halfway through the party, Reagan walks up to me, unprovoked, with the birthday boy, our friend Dawson. And she's like, can he open my present now? I wanna see his face. I'm like, Sure. So they sit down in the Ninja Gym and he opens her present and is on Cloud Nine. Big hug. Wow. She's beaming, ear to ear. All the other parents, they're like, what just happened? I'm like, Reagan's learning generosity. She's gonna be that 25-year-old that's like taking care of her friends, hospitable, service-oriented, that's generosity. You gotta earn it first. Here's the whole point. Unless you earn as a kid, Okay, this is why schools fail this. You can't homework money. We were talking about this before. Unless you earn it by creating value first, you'll never be able to learn how to save or invest or spend or share. But parents give their kids 10 bucks to go put it to the giving thing, church or whatever. They don't learn it that way. Kids give them an allowance and say, here's your debit card, whatever, chase for kids or green, like that doesn't work. You, they'll, they're just spending your money. It's not their money. They won't learn delayed gratification to save and invest if you're just giving them stuff. So this is why we start with value creation first and then the home economy system. Like once you implement this, and, and, and a lot of people try this, they know what I'm saying. They all agree, but they have to do whiteboards and checklists and Google spreadsheets and stuff that they erase and go grab a bunch of roll of quarters and ones from the, and they do it for a month. And then they quit.

Yeah, it's too much, it's too tiring.

Right, so our system, like Dinner Table and our app, trains the parents on how to have this automated auto repeating gigs, print out every week for the fridge, one-click payments, it's all set to teach the kids. So that's why we built it, is like, how do we make this super.

Super easy for families to do? That's great, man. You know, one of the things I think about is the trauma that money brings to families. I mean, you know, originally as a kid, you see your parents fighting over something. A lot of divorces are either caused or influenced around money, traumas, problems, arguments.

That just- Biggest fight.

Resentment, frustration, lack of love, all these different things. So what is money trauma and how can we start to heal from the money traumas we have?

Yeah, so we did a study when we started all this, 'cause we've been doing business fairs for a decade. the online helping of kids, 7 million families. We surveyed a ton of them like four years ago. What we found was that parents said we have no roadmap here. We have no one's ever taught us how to pass on the financial competencies. All we were told to do was like give them a allowance in three jars, maybe if we're smart, save, spend, share, get them a bank account when they hit puberty, try to save for their future and maybe do a lemonade stand if we have time. Like that's all they're ever taught, which none of those really help unless you're going this way. The kids were the most profound of all of it. These kids said, we don't want to talk about money. It's the biggest fight in our home. And we're like, okay, so we did a follow up survey. What do you mean? Tell us, what did they say? What were the questions? So that's what we heard. Parents go, we can't afford that. Do you have any idea how much that costs? Money doesn't grow on trees. Do you know how hard I worked to get you this? And you guys just blew it or you took it for granted? You broke that. Do you know how much that was for me to buy for you?

You hear? Yeah, the resentment, anger, frustration.

They hear parents bawling over bills, they hear it. Parents think they protect them, but they're not. They hear it.

What does that cause in a child when they hear parents arguing over money and battling over bills.

They see money as an absolute like firecracker for fights. It's immediate rejection of this idea of money. They have a negative connotation to it right away. And then when there is money involved, parents are buying the things for them. Like, oh, every parent has this struggle. They think that, oh yeah, I just want to take care of them. Like, let's go out, let's go on the trip. I want to buy this for you.

I want to give them what I didn't have.

That's right. I want to give them all the things I never had growing up. I want to give them all the opportunities I never had. I don't want them to have to deal with the crap I dealt with. That's what parents say. And it's out of love.

The intention is good, but it's the.

Fastest way to entitle them. See, we have an epidemic of entitlement and parents don't realize it because it's coming from a place of love.

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So what we're trying to get parents to do is be like really clear on how do you teach what money is, start with value creation, and have open conversations. Like we have 200 dinner table questions for families in our free community. It's like the dinner table, whatever, we'll give you the links. But you go through this with your kids in an open way. If you're investing, why are you not teaching your children, even as young as six years old, what the investment was, what the return is, how it's going to help create value for people, and why you're excited about it?

Right.

Everyone doesn't do that. When you're giving as a parent, if you're donating to something, why are you not bringing your kids into the conversation? Ask them if they think there's a better idea or who else they might want to give to or tell them what the service does, the value that it creates in the gift. You bring your kids along with you. I bring my kids on most trips.

Yes.

Like, they're young still, but I want them learning from other people. Here's a powerful one. Families that have parents traveling. Like if dad travels a lot or mom travels for work, that wreaks havoc. Because you never know until it's too late when there's lashing out and things happen. Here's a brilliant hack. So what you do is you sit your kids down before you leave. Say, hey guys, daddy or mommy, daddy's gonna be going on this trip. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm representing our family to help these people. And here's exactly how I'm gonna be serving them. And I want you guys to be like checking in. I wanna talk to you like tomorrow afternoon after, like when I'm doing this. Can we check in? And like, I want you to ask me these questions to see how it went. you know, or pray for me during it, right? And when I get back, we're gonna unpack it. I'm gonna tell you how many people we got to help and what we taught them, and then we're gonna do these really fun things together 'cause I'm really, I wanna celebrate the trip. That conversation makes your children know that you're doing something as a team. If you don't do that, your kids think that you're going off to do something more important than they are.

Wow.

Especially to go make money. which ties it right back in. Me making money is more important than you if you don't have those open conversations.

Yes. And so how does someone, if they've never thought about creating heritage or family values or values around money, how can someone start to reprogram their psychology or mindset in order to develop something healthy around their values?

Yeah.

So they can teach that to the people in their family.

Yeah. So An easy way, every month we unpack a workshop with tons of families at dinner table. So we bring in crazy amounts of families and we teach them our core six strategies of legacy. And one of them is the heritage over inheritance, okay? And it's what we've learned from the best in the world. And by the way, some of these families, you'll never meet. You'll never know. Some of these families are the billionaires that people have heard about. And I'm not talking about Rothschilds and Trumps, like they have crazy in their family. Right? I'm talking about families that just unbelievable in the value they create together, incredible in their heritage, absolute depth of relationship. See, here's my definition of legacy, by the way. Legacy is raising children and grandchildren to blow by you in every way.

Wow.

See, most people hear the word legacy and they go, oh, I don't want to be Rothschilds and Vanderbilts. Screw that. And I'm like, that's not what we're talking about. Or they go, you,'re too late, Scott. I am disqualified. My kids have these problems. I hate my in-laws.

Wow.

I'm divorced. I have business problems. And I'm like, well, time out. I've never met a family in the world that doesn't have crazy in it. Every family has crazy in it. What I'm talking about is a recipe. If you just follow the strategies, then over time you're gonna be moving in the right direction. and everyone's gonna have a legacy whether you like it or not. The question is what kind of legacy?

Yes.

So for us, we're like, look, it's never too late. If you have something crazy in your life, I believe that God uses setbacks in our lives to be setups to help create value for other people.

Yes.

So if that's true, then you can use it to have an incredible legacy. Just follow the recipe.

So you have six strategies for legacy.

Yeah.

How does that work out?

So it starts with the value creation setup. So we teach those three buckets: material value, emotional value, and spiritual value. That's the first step. Step two is the home economy that I just walked you through. Expectations, expenses, and extra pay gigs. But however, there's like 300 of those. There's gigs for adult children. So I know you have listeners that have adult children. College in their 20s. And they're like, yeah, the biggest question I get is where were you 20 years ago? And I'm like, no, no, no, timeout. These can start now. So we have that whole home economy for adult children too. Then we go into heritage over inheritance. We go through your family values. What makes your DNA? And here's my tip for that. Children, like most people think that, oh yeah, we need a mission statement as a family. That's what everyone thinks. I'm like, nope. Kids don't think in terms of that. Kids think in story. You need to be telling value-based stories of your family heritage. We tell our children how our family came across the Oregon Trail.

Wow.

We have the Journal of Camilla Donnell from like five generations ago. She was the medic, 19 years old, like crazy stories. We tell these to our kids. We talk about, we go all the way back to the McDonald clan in Scotland. We were pilgrims. Like my grandpa was in the Korean War and saved a thousand orphans on cargo planes to come back to the US. My dad's dad invented the rope toe for skiing. Like unbelievable. Like my dad's dad and my dad built a billion dollar bank. He was Ronald Reagan's bank chair. Barney Becksma, up in Washington where we grew up. I have streets and parks named after me up north, right? My kids know these stories. But did they give me the money? No. I'm so thankful for that.

Your parents, your grandparents didn't give you the money.

They helped with some college.

Sure.

They helped with some car. And there was like a little I love you gifts when we got married.

Yeah, yeah.

See, I love, I love you gift is good.

That's what, like a moment in time where you guys, it's like supporting you in the launch of something, but not enabling you forever.

Yeah. I don't think helping with the home is a bad thing. unless that kills their value creation.

Or it's almost like a reward, like, wow, you've done so well over the last five to seven years. You've really not only lived up to the standards of doing your best in school, but also adding value in the world. You've been a generous human being. You've shown up in service and community.

That's right.

You went on trips and spent six months and did whatever.

That's right.

And so, gosh, you're getting married, you're about to have a home, Here's 10 grand, here's 50 grand, or whatever it is how much money the person has.

But- A thousand dollars. I mean, anything you show you love them. But there's a difference between I love you in coasting gifts, right?

Like, and- what's the difference between that?

So the moment it crosses over to like, they're not gonna go through healthy struggles to grow, you're letting them coast.

Gosh.

That's it. If you kill the value creation drive, then you are robbing your children of the future they could have.

But is it a lack of love if you rob them, but you say, I don't want them to struggle and go through pain. I don't want them to suffer, so I want to take care of them. Which one is more loving?

See, healthy struggles are not the same as trauma. Trauma is neglect, abuse, tough love, even. Those are unhealthy.

Like extreme tough love.

Healthy struggles are emotional skills that come out of this. Relationship skills, business skills, practical skills, financial competencies. These are the outcome of healthy struggles. See, the difference here is a healthy struggle is a struggle that you're with them in. I'm on your team. I'm your coach. I got your back. I'm here to support and love you through this. An unhealthy struggle is where you're like, causing the trauma from it. You're either with them in it or you're impressing on these problems. And so the goal here is to have good processes and protect your relationship. That's the whole point.

Right. Okay, so this is heritage over inheritance and what makes your DNA. So you have a process for... We.

Help families unpack their... Their DNA. Their DNA. So they get like a crest.

It's not a mission statement of our family.

Right.

But you build a family crest.

Yeah, it's like acronyms and crest and stories that you're telling. And we have a whole dinner style dinner views and conversations around it. See, here's the thing. If you don't give your kids an identity of what it means to be in your family, they will find that identity somewhere else in the world. See, modern, in the last 10 years, it's shifted. There's so much popularity of social media, text group chats, YouTube channels. Teenagers are hunting for identity. And either you give them the roots in your family, an identity or they're gonna find it somewhere else. And it's probably not even their friends or a coach. It's gonna be online. That is a wild thought for today. But if you ask most children, well first you go, what do you wanna be when you grow up? Most of them say famous online.

Right, YouTube or TikTok or whatever it is.

Or they say something that their parents did, 'cause that's all they know.

Yes.

But the goal here is like we have to give kids roots and wings. You give them roots in your home, a strong identity of who they are, what it means to carry on your last name. And you tell that through stories, principle-based stories. Like in 30 years, your kids are not gonna sit around the table looking at a wall at a mission statement.

Right, right.

They're gonna tell stories.

Right, so what would you say are the main values of the DNA of your family and your heritage?

My kids say it every day. Faith, family, and fish. They know exactly what it means to be a Donal. We love God, we back each other as a family, and fish, which is fun and adventure, integrity, service, and hard work. Faith, family, fish. And we want him to learn to fish, just like I was learning to learn to fish. First business at eight years old, I was trained.

It's literally fish for the four things in fish, but like, Learning how to fish yourself and not be given the fish.

My three-year-old says it every day at dinner. And now we have a map. So now we're hunting for things that every night at dinner, like they're hunting for stories of the day. Then they did to display faith, family, and friends. Really? Every day. And then we have a power clap, 'cause our kids are young and they think that's cool still. But yeah, every day they're telling stories. And we're like, Power clap for Sawyer! Huh, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they just have this identity now.

Now, when they fish during the day and share what they fished for, I guess, do they get rewarded financially for contributing at the dinner table?

Nope. That one's just like celebrate.

That's okay.

That's a standard. That's a celebration. Now the gigs is different, right? We will reward them for the gigs.

Yes, yes.

If we're doing that home economy 3E's.

Wow.

So on the fridge every day, Reagan and Sawyer are our oldest too. They know what they can do to earn. And they have a list of the next three expenses that they're in charge of. So now they got the motive. See, they never ask us for money and stuff. Never.

Not since three years old. Dad, Mom, I wanna get this.

Can you get this for me? Yeah.

See, 'cause that's a problem in homes. It's a big problem in homes. I wanna buy these shoes.

I wanna buy this jacket. I need these sunglasses, whatever it is. It's a lose-lose in the home.

Why? 'Cause if your kids ask you, you say yes, you're slowly entitling and spoiling them.

That's another challenge.

At some point you have to cut it off so they can do it on their own. And if they've been 10 years, 20 years, you doing it, and all of a sudden, I don't know how to do this.

And if you say no, you're the bad guy. So what we did is we created a system where they don't even ask you. They just know exactly where to go. Okay, so what we're doing is protecting relationship in the home. So many parents are buying love, bribing their kids, or coercing them with money and stuff, especially in Co-parenting. Oh man. See, this is the biggest thing.

Get more love. Who's got more love and affection?

Bribery and coercion. Buy the love, make it better than dad's house. Back, forth. And then the kids just breed entitlement everywhere, unless you can get a co-parenting strategy with this home economy.

That creates a lot of trauma.

Yep. Massive trauma. People think that the trauma comes from the split. The trauma comes from all the other things that happen because of the split.

The manipulation.

Yeah.

So that's step three in the strategy of legacy. What's number four?

Breakthroughs. We call them relationship breakthroughs. I don't have time with you to unpack it because this is a several hour thing. But let me ask you about this idea. You're engaged now, right? Congratulations.

Thank you.

Soon to be married. What if you were loving your fiance in a 10 state for you, that's only a one state for her?

Loving her what I think is a 10, but for her, she's receiving it as a one.

Yeah.

That you mean?

Like my wife and I, this happens all the time.

What would it be like?

She gets one-tenth of the love you're trying to give her.

Man, that'd be tough.

My wife's love languages are acts of service, words of encouragement. Me, I'm a dog. Time and touch. Yeah. So for years, we had issues.

Man.

And I'm like, I just want to hug her and kiss her and sit on the couch and pet my head like a dog.

She's like, Go do this for me. Yeah.

She's like, Go do the trash. Go take care of the kids. And it wasn't until we unpacked these languages, but Lily wrote down, When you do these five things for me, I feel a 10. You literally should rank this with your partner.

Yes, yeah. We did this early on.

Yeah.

It was a game changer.

But then you do it with your children. How many kids and parents, you're trying to love them in your way.

Yeah.

And parent them. but they're getting it as a one and you don't realize that. They're not receiving it. They're not receiving the love. So you're like, you know, I just want to hug you at the end of the day or spend time together and they're like, I want to go play ball. I want you to speak words of encouragement over me. You know, I want a surprise fun thing together. That's a gifting mentality. So we unpack those with both the parents and then with their children because it saves so much of the relationship. It saves so much of the trauma and the pain.

What's number five?

Number five is something we call pay to a point.

Pay to a point.

Yeah. These are the questions that no estate planner or lawyer will ever ask you, but we ask them all because we've worked with 7 million families. We know, like it starts with this. Do you believe that you own everything or do you believe that it was given to you and you're a steward of it?

For me, I believe I'm a steward. Yeah. At some point, I'm not gonna own it when I'm gone. Someone else is gonna be out in the world for someone else to grab.

We ask the question of, do you see money this way, mine? Or do you see money this way?

Yeah. Right?

Or do you have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset? Right? I think that God, people can call it whatever they want, but I believe God does this. He gives to you the amount that flows through you. Okay, he's preparing us. And generosity, I think, is the number one money skill. Earn, save, spend, share, invest, protect, borrow. Share wins the game. A generous kid has an open hand of the world. The pie will get bigger. Tomorrow will be better than today.

It is.

Abundance mindset. Do you think the deals come to that person? The job comes, the friends, that's a giving person.

Yes.

I think that leads to everything else.

What do you think is the energy behind scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset? And how does someone shift from one to the other?

So I was in the Uber car on the way over here, and my Uber driver overheard me coaching a family. And we were just on like a quick Zoom coaching, and I got off and he's like, Man, this is like the craziest thing. I can't believe you're saying this to me. I have all these problems with my kids. Like one of them's estranged. Like we don't talk, like we have all these problems. I can't believe they're not helping me. They're doing things I don't like. They're hurting, they hurt me. My ex, she hurt me. I am the victim in all this stuff. And I was like, man, I am so sorry. This sucks. But I was like, can I just give you a thought? Like what if you used these things that happened? and turned him into incredible opportunity to create value for other people. No one had ever said the words value creation to him before. He said, what if what you've gone through can be an incredible opportunity to help others and grow? And he went, what? Never even thought about it. So we just start moving. If you go into value creation, how can I create material value, emotional value, and spiritual value for others? You're an abundant mindset.

That's when you step into abundance.

That's when you tap into abundance.

When you think of how do I create value?

Yep.

Not how do I be the victim.

That's right. Victimhood, entitlement, spoiling, even anxiety and anxiousness and self-doubt, right? Laziness, those are all scarcity mindsets, okay? And scarcity mindset's very dangerous.

What does someone get when they have a scarcity mindset?

They think that tomorrow will be worse. There's not enough to go around. I need my cut. You owe me. I deserve. I deserve. This is an entitled kid turned into a grown-up. Nothing's worse than a lazy victim kid that becomes a grown-up. Because when they fail, which everyone has failures, but when they fail... They blame others. It's mom and dad's fault. It's the government's fault. It's my employer's fault.

It's the president, it's this, it's whatever, yeah.

That's it. that's a scarcity mindset.

And when someone has that energy of scarcity within them, it lives in their them physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. What are they saying to the world? Like, what does that energy say?

It I think it says I.

And can people feel that energy?

Yeah, it says you owe me and you hurt me and I don't need to do anything to you, but be frustrated.

Wow.

And when, but if you have an abundance mindset, you're able to see even hard things as opportunities in disguise.

As blessings.

As blessings.

Yeah.

The hardest things in my past, I'm talking hard, like on the floor, gut wrenching, near bankruptcy, miscarriage, death, health issues. pain. I could either say, screw you to the world for this, or I can say, what am I to learn here? And how can this be of service to others? And you know what? This is hard, but thank God for this, this, this, this, this. Wow. Over the. The orchestration of my life, I never saw before, right? Like. if you can train your mind in abundance that way, you are telling the world, Hey, we all go through tough stuff, but we can either use that to build diamonds or just burn coal. Whatever you want. But I would rather go the diamond route, and I want my kids to go that route because that's legacy to me. I want my kids to blow by me in their mindsets, in their skill sets, in their financial competency, in their generosity, in their impact in the world, their values, that's my desire. That's my deathbed desire, man. No one has ever talked about work on their deathbed. It's always family. So if family is my number one investment, then I'm gonna do the coaching, do the learning, figure this out now while they're with me so that they can be abundant.

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For decades.

For decades and you have no idea how you did. There's no instant gratification with parenting. Here's what I think. Parenting.

Unless you give your child something a gift and they love you and hug you in a moment or something, yeah.

But the long term, it's like, we'll see how it happens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You put the recipe in, like, let's see what happens, right? But I think parenting is really hard, but for all the right reasons, right? Like, you know, you have to get eight hours of sleep. That's hard. Working out, hard. Eating the right stuff, hard. Parenting is hard, but in all the good ways that you always have wanted to become in the first place. What better way to learn selflessness? What better way to learn sacrifice? What better way to like find true inner deep joy? and satisfaction. That all comes from being an amazing parent. You can get it in other places too, but it comes from being an amazing parent and raising humans that start out completely scarcity, completely selfish, completely entitled, and our job is to mold them into productive adults, not future children.

Wow. Yeah. But you don't get that instant gratification is where you're saying.

You don't.

It's thankless.

It's thankless for so long. But that's why I love adults of like, parents of adult children that have like grown as amazing adults. 'Cause you ever met, there's two types of older people. People that are bitter towards the world, the old guy on the corner of the street that's cussing at you and-.

He does what everything, hitting you with.

A stick, mad at the government and whatever the Democrats are doing. But then there's the old sweet person. Like the old lady or the old guy who's just so kind. so loving, so generous, so helpful. Like, what turns people into that? Is it a life of like bitterness and victimhood and entitlement? Probably for that old man, the angry one. Or a life of like refinement and growth and value creation. Turns that into a sweet old person. I want the sweet old man. That's my goal.

Sure.

So when parents are like, when their kids are growing up, that's just a sweet, sweet thing.

Yes. I saw someone, a friend of mine, Noah Kagan, did an interview with, I can't remember, some billionaire, some super successful billionaire. He was an older gentleman, probably in his 70s, maybe 80. And he asked him, what's his definition of success at this season of his life? And he said, My adult children wanting to spend time with me because they actually enjoy spending time with me. Not because I have money, not because I'm successful, not because I give them anything. Because they just want to hang out with me. That's right. I was like, that's probably what every, you know, elderly individual of adults want.

That's what they all say. That's right.

Their kids would come over to their house on the weekends and hang out.

Yeah, if you want to have an incredible legacy, you should spend half as much money on your children and twice as much time. See, there is no, kids do not know the difference between quality time and quantity time. There's no difference. It's not up to you to decide that doing Legos with your five-year-old could be a core memory for the rest of their life. And you had no idea. Right. With children, it's just time clocked.

But how do you Scott, when you know managing all these businesses, have all this, you're traveling constantly, you've got coaching tons of people, you're, you know, you're always on the go. How do you find the time? quality or quantity to invest in your family and your kids?

Yeah, so it starts with our structure. Okay, so I've put people around me in my life who agree first. It starts with inner circle. So we have a structure in our world where the five closest families around us and our children have the same values of investing in our families together.

Your friend families.

Our closest families. We are on the same mission and all of the values I just walked you through.

And that could be together as all the families, or it could be like, on the weekends we do this as, anyone's welcome to come over.

We're together on weekends.

Family time, yeah.

Travel, like we, this is our inner circle, because this is done in community. If you're on an island, it's very difficult. So parenting, I believe, should be done in community. This is why we do coaching with families all the time at dinner table. So you have to unpack this with other families. You have to have families that align with your values. See, here's the teenager hack. You ready? You need coaches and trusted other adults in your teenager's life that can reinforce the things you care about most. You have to have that.

They may not always listen to you.

They won't after a while. There's a chunk of time.

But if there's five other, you know, coaches or teachers or mentors that say the same things.

Yeah.

They might resonate with them and say, okay, maybe dad was right all along.

You probably have 100,000 teenagers that have listened to you that go to their parents and go, you guys, I just learned this awesome thing from Lewis.

They're like, I've been saying this my whole life.

Thank you, yeah. But you want to say that to your kids. Yeah, yeah. You want your kids coming to you with, like, revealed knowledge that you've been trying to teach them for 10 years.

It doesn't matter who gave them the light bulb. Yeah. You celebrate it.

It's a thankless job, I guess, right? That's it. You teach it, but someone else gets the credit. So it starts with your inner circle. like we are clear on that piece. And then it goes into structure. And so with structure, my wife and I, every year, we block out stuff first for our family.

Like the whole calendar year.

The whole year. Trips, dates, family stuff, like what we're doing with our kids, big events, like that goes first. Then we can fill in work and other things after. You have to do that. Every Sunday night, we're like going over the week, we're just blocking out date night, we're blocking out when the kids events are, work fills in that gap. That is the best way to focus your time and effort.

So schedule family stuff first, then fill in the gaps with work or other things.

That's exactly right.

Structure, inner circle, is there another element to this?

I mean, going through our six strategies. Yeah, I got the end.

Pay to a point was five.

That's right. Yep. And then, but the last part of pay to a point is like, How do you do first phone? What do you pay for? How do I do car? How do I do college? Are we doing college? Do we care about college? Is it an indoctrination station or is it good? What about the 25-35 year old I love you versus coasting? What do we want to die with? What is our number that we're okay with? How much do we want to give? These are questions that nobody asks their children or themselves. And what our thing is, we need to be open about these conversations. We have to have a roadmap. Because if you don't have a roadmap for this, you're reactive. See, there's all these other parenting, and you've had other amazing parent people here, but there's about a thousand different parenting strategies out there. Free range, gentle, like whatever, helicopter, laissez-faire, there's a million of them. I look at it with one lens. you're either parenting proactively or you're parenting reactively. Most parents are just trying to get through it and get them fed, keep them safe, get them to bed, get them to school. They're being reactive when all these things come up. And that's what causes a lot of these problems. If you can just be a little bit proactive, these are little nudges. Nothing I've told you today is hard, crazy. These are little nudges in the right direction, and then just unpack them with someone and take your first step. See, that's proactive parenting. That's all that matters. Yeah.

And you don't have to have it all figured out in a weekend or something.

This is gonna take time to develop.

That's right.

Navigate and adjust over time.

Long-term communities. Yeah. Yep. So the sixth step for six strategy for legacy, what's the sixth one?

Inner circle. That's inner circle. And dinner views. Dinner views. Yeah, interview dinners. We, it's part of that hack. What we love to do is Our entire upstairs in our home is wide open for guests and friends and family and board members and investors and those people we love. That thing is full two-thirds of the year. Our kids have a constant cycle of like great people in our lives that come to dinner and our kids research them and find questions and ask them questions.

Interesting.

Tell me about this. Okay, you married at this, how'd you guys get married? How'd you do that business? Tell us about your biggest mistake. What's your biggest fear? How old are your kid? Like our little kids ask good questions.

So it's kind of like a, you know, lunch and learn of a business, but for your family.

For your family.

For dinner.

And they learn from other people so much more. That's for sure. A lot of families take for granted the kids and the parents, but when you bring other people that are reinforcing things, it just sticks. You could probably do this. If you took one minute to think what were the five most pivotal moments or conversations of my life? I know my five. Those are with mentors and trusted people and events that happened that completely took my life in a different direction.

Yes.

That had that not happened, I would not be anywhere close to who I am today.

Right, right.

That's the power of doing this with your kids.

How many, I guess, dinner views do you have?

Three months.

Three a month.

Is a good, that's a good starting point.

Yeah, yeah.

But just like be intentional about this stuff, man. So here's another thing about inner circles. There's a study that came out, and I'm gonna butcher the sources, but I think it was Stanford a few years back. They did a study on obesity and network.

Oh, tell me.

Okay. They found huge study. If you have close friends in your inner circle that are obese, you're 45% more likely to gain weight in the next year.

Oh man.

Say, and I'm looking at this from a different lens, right? Like this relates to families and children. So if that's 45%, but then they took it a rung out, if you don't directly know the person, but it's a friend of an inner circle friend, you're 20% more likely to gain weight in the next year. And if it's a third rung, friend of friend of friend, you're 10% more likely. Wow. And I go, that's the best analogy of inner circle and network that I've ever seen.

It's probably the same thing around money. How is your inner circle related to how much money you make or can make?

Your view of money, your generosity, your investing mindset, your delayed gratification thinking, your up leveling. I've up leveled. I'm not just throwing away friends, but I'm saying I've up leveled my networks 20 times in my life already. And because I want to be around the people that have like stepped in my shoes and they're like in one domain of their life where I want to head as the North Star. And I think the trick here that a lot of people don't realize is mentors become friends as you grow in what they teach you.

Yeah, as you learn and get to a level.

They're your peers.

Yeah, exactly.

And what a lot of people don't realize is that. And so some of my best friends in the world were mentors to start.

Wow.

Yeah, we have a lot of older friends that I just we love them and their families and now I mentor their children.

Wow.

It's like a slingshot, right? I have a bunch of young guys in their 20s come over to our house every month around the campfire till midnight and we just train, coach. They're asking and all their parents are like dear friends of ours. That's the best way to do it. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

Campfire. How many times do you do a campfire?

Once a month. That's pretty cool. Bring them over. We do campfires and s'mores all the time. Really? Oh, yeah. We're always playing in the backyard and the pool and doing campfires We have like the gas fires.

That's amazing.

Yeah, man.

Wow. Okay. So the six strategies for legacy value creation set up home economy, the three E's, heritage over inheritance, building your family DNA, relationship breakthroughs.

Yep.

Paid to a point strategy.

Can I say one more thing on those relationships? Yes. We teach the ten love, the love languages in the ten states. but we also talk about forgiveness. Because now, because I know the thread of this talk is trauma and money trauma and how we think about this, right? Money trauma is a massive issue. It's the only trauma that we wake up and work for for the rest of our life.

What do you mean?

So when you're a silver spoon kid where things are paid for, okay? You know that you didn't earn things growing up. You're not fully prepared. And then you get there, and you're like, I can't do this to my kids. Hard knocks, tough love, make it work on your own. Because you usually screw up somewhere and then it's like, you know, hard, good men, strong times, strong men, weak time, weak times, like bad, weak men, bad times. And then that goes the cycle. This is what happens in families, every generation. You come from like everything was provided for. I never had to struggle and grow to like, you're like, oh no, and then your kids struggle. you either screw it up and your kids go back to nothing, or the other way where you start from nothing and then you grow up and you're like, I can't do this to my kids. I gotta pay for everything and give them everything. So we teeter-totter. Every generation just teeter-totters back and forth and it causes immense money traumas. And then the problem there is you're waking up every day and working for that trauma. With all the other types of trauma, you're like, how do I not think about this? How do I heal from this? How do I let this go?

Right?

You're trying to like get therapy and help at best and like move through to forgiveness and like this one, you got to then wake up the next day and figure out how am I paying the bills?

Wow. So how does someone start to heal from these many wounds or many traumas then?

Well, I think that the main thing we got to understand is we're told to forgive. Like the Bible tells us to forgive. The Bible does, I don't think the Bible teaches us how to forgive.

Just says do it.

Just says do it and do it a lot. Because to the degree you forgive others, you're gonna be forgiven. I believe in that, but I don't think it teaches us actually how to let things go. So we got a lot of really good training when we went through some really tough stuff. And it was through some of the top, I won't say all the names, there's like six of them, but they are trauma forgiveness, let go, therapists. And what you do is you basically go through a system where you can call forth in your mind what happened. Call the person forward that it was or the situation and declare what happened, okay? And you're in a safe setting in your mind. Then you can actually move and feel that. And then there's a moment in every trauma or painful thing in our life where you can find what I call the gift. doesn't justify what happens. It doesn't make it okay. What you do is you say, because of that difficult thing, I am now this kind of a person. And I'm so thankful for how I love my kids better. I love my new partner better. I'm better in business from this. I care about my health better. That's the gift. And now you can sit in that gift and feel that and swell that overwhelmingly. And when you sit there long enough, It starts to spill over to forgiveness, where you can actually say, I forgive you in love. That's the love where you say, you don't justify. I forgive this. I can let this go. I won't let this eat me away anymore. That's actual forgiveness.

Yeah, there's a book called the Gift from Edith Eger, who was a Holocaust survivor and talks about this gift from being a Holocaust survivor through all the pain and suffering and sadness and horror. and obviously, Viktor Frankl talks about the meaning man's search for meaning with suffering, sadness, loss, breakdown, you know, horrible abuse, all these different things.

Yeah.

It's like, where is the meaning in it? And it's hard to find it right away in the mess or the. The sadness or the suffering. It's usually later when we reflect back on the stories.

Yeah.

That we remember. Yeah. You know, when we're adults and we get into our 20s and 30s and we have breakdowns around money or anxiety or traumas or we are not good stewards of it. We get into debt a lot or we hoard it and we are scared with it. We're not giving any of it away.

That's all we think about all day, every day.

We obsess about it on our accounts and all these different things. It's like there's anxiety, there's avoidant, there's a lack of secure emotions tied to money and the stories that were created from these memories. How does someone navigate into a secure attachment around money where they're generous but not overly generous, giving it all away, but they're also intentional and they save and they're not getting taken advantage of, they're not taking out too much debt. How do they have a secure attachment style with money?

So we either learn to master money or it will master us, okay? So it starts with an understanding where money doesn't ident, money is never my identity, good or bad. Money is never my achievement, my status, how other people think of me, keeping up with the Joneses. Or money, I don't believe that money will never come to me. I don't believe that I'm bad with money. I don't believe that I'm not worth anything. Those are the negative poverty mindsets that hit people all the time. Those both need to be rejected. And what you need to do is you put money in its proper place as simply a store of value. And I'm going to focus on being a value to others and then being disciplined when I do get money.

Right?

There's two sides. Money comes from creating value unless you steal it. Money comes from creating value for others. So what are my skills? What are the ways I'm creating value for other people? In the material value, right? There's other types of value. But in this world, what do I love to do? Where am I creating immense value for other people? And where am I really good at things? We call that the sweet spot, okay? This is very controversial, but I don't believe in a calling. And all my like, the God friends, and I love God, They're like, How dare you say that? There's a calling for everyone. I'm like, yeah, but then when something goes wrong, you think you missed your calling. I don't believe in any of that. I think that God gives us incredible skills and talents, things that we love to do, because some people love things they suck at, and they're like really good at things they hate. And then that has to meet huge needs in the world that create a lot of value. It's a sweet spot, and that's what we need to do with our children. okay? We often asked kids, what do you wanna do when you grow up? That's a bad question. You gotta ask your kids, what lights you up? And then you hone in on that.

What excites you?

What excites you? What is a big need in the world for you? What do you think is a huge need that we can solve? Like get them thinking that way. And when you're focusing on creating value in the world, a lot of that baggage just kind of melts. Like, you know, they talk about if you're depressed, or suicidal or sad, the best way to get out of it is to go serve somebody, go help someone, go encourage somebody. It's the best, quickest hack. So that creates value. And so the point here with like a 35-year-old that's spinning and they're in their midlife crisis and they're struggling, it's like, go back to basics and realize that money is just a store of value, and that I want to hone my skills to do what I love, what I'm good at, and what meets massive needs in the world.

How does someone When they understand money is a store of value and they realize they don't have any of it, how do they not say, well, that means I don't have any value because I haven't learned how to make money or manage it properly. So I am worthless.

Money is not a store of your value. Money is simply a store of its own value. That's why you have to remove the identity structure. You, Louis, are invaluable. As a human, you are invaluable. That's the first step.

Right.

I'm valuable just by being a person.

Yes.

But the value that I can create for others, the problems I can solve, the wants and needs I can meet, the empathy and service and ways to hunt for like helping.

Yes.

One of the rewards is financial, so money is a store of creating that kind of value. So one better question to ask yourself is instead of saying, why am I so worthless? Is to say, how might I create more value?

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That's beautiful. I love that. Most people just, you know, have their kids say a prayer at night or.

Just- yeah, we do that too.

-But it's like, also ask this question, how did you add value today?

It's incredible question.

That's powerful.

And it's an unlimited question. It's not a yes or no.

Right, right, right.

'Cause you want kids to be in a, like the spirit of play. Make it a game.

Make it a game.

Make it fun. Like until further notice with your children, celebrate everything. You should make things fun. The spirit of play trumps the spirit of coercion and power every single time. If you have a defiant kid, if you have a kid that's just tough, it's like this kid battles me. I gotta sit there for 30 minutes after dinner to make him take that last bite. Everyone has those kids. I have one.

Wow.

The way to win that is to win their heart. You have to have fun. Enjoy that child. If you can enjoy the child and play, you win their heart. And then you win loyalty. And then all those tough traits that you were frustrated at before now get to be used for power. See, that kid grows up, they're not gonna be swayed. They're not gonna be, you know, bullied. They won't let other people bully them. In fact, if that's a teenage girl, when you win that loyalty and you win that heart, they're not gonna be taken advantage of. They're not gonna let the bullies and the cliques tell them who they are.

Wow.

You see the power of that kind of a kid?

Yes.

So the key is to switch it.

What is the, I guess, what is the big risk at stake when someone attaches their identity with their self-worth to their net worth.

You might have just asked the hardest one. This is why it's so critical to remove what money is.

Okay?

It's a tool. Like when you swing a hammer, do you think you're the hammer?

No.

You're not. Right. Money is a tool. store of value and it's a tool that makes you more of who you already are. If you're a jerk and you make a million dollars, you're just gonna be a million times the jerk. If you're humble, if you're generous, if you're kind, if you're diligent, if you have delayed gratification, if you're caring, you're gonna be that a million fold with more, right? It makes you more of who you already are.

Yes.

So we have to actually remove money from self-worth.

How do you do that? When you start around money.

You know, this is about certain types of value. Okay? I know teachers who make 40 grand a year that are absolute saints. They're not making money as value. That's one type of value. They're making immense emotional and spiritual values. all the time. Their bank account in that is overflowing.

Yes.

Okay. I know friends that have crazy businesses that I don't like what they do for their business that are making a hundred million dollars.

Yes.

They make zero emotional and spiritual value in the world. They're actually negative in those.

Right.

They're sucking that value out of the world. So just because somebody has a bunch of money, don't misplace a blessed life. with money. I am the richest guy I know because of my relationship with my wife, my faith in God, my four beautiful children, the incredible friends we have around us, our businesses that get to serve millions of people and kids and families. I am the richest guy I know. But we like to give way more than we like to invest even. that's true wealth. So don't tie it to the dollar amount in the bank account. You have to think of a broader view of value.

When people, you know, network of friends or family tie their value to material.

Things, the Joneses, possessions, keeping up with the Joneses.

Yeah, their credentials of how much they paid for something to get a college degree and look at me and all these external things that create validation or identity for them. When that's a part of their upbringing, their parents, their siblings, their friends, their whole inner circle, how do they break free of that without breaking free of those relationships fully and just divorcing their friends and family in their life? Yeah. When everyone else puts so much value and identity on net worth and material things versus the self-worth of intrinsic qualities, generosity, humility, character traits, love, thoughtfulness, integrity, connection, listening, all these things. How do they break free without- Breaking up? Breaking up, yes.

Break free without breaking up? Yes. Yeah, there's family that you have. You're born with them. There's family you choose.

Yes.

You and I have our value sets. We would agree that it's good to be financially secure and create value and continually grow that, not stealing it. Create a lot of value for a lot of people and the money takes care of itself. We also agree in character traits, mindsets, like self-worth and self-confidence, the other value buckets. You need to figure out what your top 10 list of your values are. How you view money, how you view relationships, how you view God, how you view like what matters most in your life. Have you ever written those? Have people ever written those down? Most don't. Most like sway and they just get whatever social media tells them.

Yeah, react or sway. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So get that clear and then you say, now I'm gonna hunt for my family. doesn't mean you break up with a sibling or a parent or someone. It just means you might not give them the weight because they haven't earned that. Just because you're related to somebody doesn't mean that they have the say on your identity. They can still be related to you, but you could put them in another level of weight and the value that you take from them. Right. And what they say.

Yeah.

That's okay. As a, you know, when we do this inner circle thing with kids, and here's a good way to see it. When you have children, I was talking to my buddy Brandon Turner, if you have children that have somebody in their life that's a negative person, like you think that they might get them bad material in their life or say terrible things or they'll see negative content or they'll hurt them, like, I will uproot my family to get away from that kid. I will do anything so that that kid has no say in my kid's identity or their life.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. I'm going straight to Mom and Dad. I'm like, you,'re never going, like, I will do what it takes, like Papa Bear style.

Holy crap.

You have to protect that. But we don't do that with ourselves. We let our cousins say weird crap. We let our in-laws say things, we let our siblings say things. We hear stuff from an uncle or a parent that's just vitriol. Why do you take that? You can still love somebody and not be completely shifted by every word that comes out of their mouth.

Yeah, or can it be?

If that is the case, what's the trauma that you're trying to get, like, daddy issues and buying, like, getting their love back? You know, how many entrepreneurs do we know have just bad dad issues? Because their dad never told them they.

Loved them for sure. Yeah.

And they were driven to succeed and.

Prove them wrong or whatever. Yeah.

You love me now? Yeah. Right.

That's crazy. On a grand scale. That's crazy, man. Did you ever struggle with money issues growing up? Or as an adult, did you ever have traumas yourself? Or were your parents and grandparents just. perfect at giving you this whole formula of values and family crest and DNA and not giving you too much, but empowering you and gifting you at the right times. Like, did you just have it so easy?

No, no, never easy, but good. And I think that's how it should be. Never easy, but good. I would say out of all the things that we've been studying now with the best families in the world, I just want to honor my family. Like, they did great. They probably did like two-thirds of them pretty good. We have a long ways to go. And there's crazy. There's always crazy. In every family I've ever met, someone has crazy. But the recipe book is pretty good. But I will say money was not given. They didn't just give us everything. They had plenty, right?

They had a lot. Your parents, your grandparents had a lot.

Yeah, my dad, my grandpa sold a bank. For like a billion dollars, they put almost all of it into charitable trust. Really? To help other families around the world and not give it to me. Thank God. I am so thankful.

Were you ever resentful of that? Yeah.

Like, how come you didn't pass me this billion dollars? Never. They helped us in college, helped with like some car. When we got married, they're like, you guys are awesome. Here's a couple grand. Like, thankful.

But I didn't expect that. I wasn't entitled. Why didn't you expect it? the money from your grandparents or your parents to be passed down.

Because they said, We don't own this. We're stewards of this.

Wow.

And if we give it to you, you are gonna be ruined.

You're gonna waste it.

You're gonna waste it. You're gonna waste the gift that we're stewarding. We want you to learn how to fish and hunt because guess what, Scott? You're gonna blow by us. And I have. I have because of the way they've been speaking into me for three decades.

Wow.

I've blown by them. Thank God. So yeah, I'm so thankful for that. I had delayed gratification when I was 10. It only came from that. And so yeah, man, I'm not one of those horror stories turned redemption.

Sure.

I've had my struggles. God is constantly using my life and my business career in new investments to grow my trust and grow my abundance mindset. you know, I, God asked, I feel like God was telling me the other day, can you out give me?

Really, what does that mean?

If you ask God the question, Lord, like, how much should I give? What you're really asking is, how much can I keep?

Right, right, right. How much can I keep for me and also?

Yeah, but I believe that God gives to us at the level that it flows through us, not just financially in all ways. And so it's really important for people to think about like, is it yours or is you stewarding it?

So how do you make a decision on how much you're gonna give? And maybe this has evolved over time, but at this season of your life, when you think, God, how much should I give?

Right?

Yeah. What are you thinking about in terms of your financial donations or generosity on a yearly basis right now? Is it thinking, I'm gonna give give 99 of my money away to charities and, you know, things and churches and charities that, that need it more than me.

Yeah.

Because I have so much and I know more is coming in. Is it 10? Is it a percentage? Is it a feeling? Is it an energy exchange? How do you make those decisions of how much to give? Yeah.

The first question I want to ask is all this I'm a steward of.

It's not mine.

It's not mine. How much do you think?

So you don't think with the money that made or earned is yours?

Nope.

No. When money comes in, when you get a money in your hand.

I don't think my whole life is mine. I believe my whole life is, like I'm a steward of my whole life to God. That's just my money, my energy, the love I give, my relationships, my network, my health, my body. Like it's all a gift. So when you have that mindset, it's so easy to have an abundant mindset.

Yes. When money comes in and you get a dollar or millions that come in with a check handed to you in a bank account. What is your reaction to seeing money come in? And what is your reaction when money flows out of your account or your hand?

Well, when we got our first big exit, my wife's knees buckled.

Yeah, yeah.

Like it was crazy. And she started crying. And I was like, whoa, where's this coming from? She's like, I was a teacher when we met making 38 grand a year. We just made enough money for our great, great grandkids to be just fine. Wow.

And I said- that's the wrong way to look at it, though, right?

That's right. She knew we weren't gonna keep that. I said, it's incredible. But now we get to steward it. Ooh. So now, like we've been helping all over the world with it. Like we put it charitable trust, so you get the tax deduction so you can give more. So how does that work?

You put the whole thing into a charitable trust?

Not the whole thing. Okay. No, no, we have investments. I mean, I'm still reinvesting in my companies. Yeah, yeah, of course. I knew that God didn't want me to sit. Go create more value.

That's right. And so you got to invest it in other ways to add value.

That's why retiring is like telling God to take the parts back. Like, why would you do that? You want to keep creating value. What you should do is retire from the things you hate doing that don't add value to the world, that make you miserable. You shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. Right. So when I say create value, this is a lifelong journey. And so I knew that when we made that exit, that was just first base.

That was step one.

Wow. And so God, and he's called most of it back.

Really?

Yeah, giving, investing, starting our new company. I mean, we're eight figures into investing in this new company to help families and children, dinnertable.com, right, right. We want to help 50 million families learn legacy and learn financial competency and be free of this. Like that's our mission and it is way bigger than our first exit. Like this is crazy. I have friends who are like, you,'re crazy. I'm like, no, I'm just living out what I was called to do.

You're committed.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're not crazy. You're committed to a bigger vision.

So there's percentages.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll do 10%. We'll do, there's tithes and then there's offerings above that. But sometimes we're just like, you know what? This person has need. This organization has need. One of my close friends is Tim Tebow. They had a need.

Yeah, of course.

And I'm on speed dial with this man. What do you need? 'Cause he and I are fighting this trafficking world hard. So I'm like, Tell me what you need. And so, and there's other organizations like that, friends that are like helping in nonprofits and like YMCA's and Young Life.

Sure, sure.

What, like our job, if we're creating immense value that has financial reward, our job is to like take care of those others that are huge in the emotional and spiritual buckets. Yes.

Wow. How do you think about wants and needs with family members asking for money? When you're like, well Scott, you've got all this money, you've got this abundance of money, it's flowing into you. I could really use 10 grand right now because I'm just struggling and going through a hard time or, you know, you know, I'm sick or I've got this thing I want to do, I need to invest in this, you know, program or coaching or schooling. Can I just borrow me 20 grand, 2 grand, 500 bucks? I just need some help right now. How do you know when to give money to a family member or a friend?

I will know.

And they will steward it. Versus they've created bad habits in their life.

That's the difference.

That's them needing a bailout.

That's the difference. What are they gonna do with it? It's a heart matter. They're just grabbing, and you know that they're gonna do something wrong. or it's not going to help them create more value. That's a hard no. Even loaning money, like the borrower is slave to the lender. Like, why would I do that with a family member or friend? If I'm going to help them, here, just take, I don't even want to know. Like, this never happened here. Like, I'm just not, there's no strings ever. But I usually will try to help friends create value. My friends call it the Donal Effect, because I'm a strategy mind, engineer mind, created billions and billions and billions of dollars in value with all my friends' businesses. So they come to me and they're like, Hey, I'm having this issue. How do I 10x it? How do I fix the financial issue, the product market fit, the scale problem, the cash burn? And so I would much rather help them create value in the world than just just fix the whole thing so they don't learn anything with the check.

Right?

That's the main thing.

Gotcha. And if they're creating value, you might help them along the way. Sure.

Investing in them.

Showing that they're making adding value in certain ways. That's right. They're taking the steps for themselves. Yeah. What are your thoughts on debt? Because we were mentioning this kind of before about there's, you know, one camp that says have zero debt. The Shallow Remain Nameless. Yeah. The fight I was in.

Yeah.

There's one camp of mindset. which is don't have any debt.

They're gonna know who we're talking about, dude.

Pay everything with cash. Get out of debt, pay off all the loans you have, and start building wealth. And there's other camps that are just like, borrow as much as you can. Kiyosaki talks about this. Borrow, borrow, borrow.

I don't have cash. Cash is stupid.

Yeah, yeah, cash is trash, cash is stupid. There's two different trains of thought. And then there's a middle that's kind of like a balance of both. That's what I say. Where do you think about debt and taking money from banks or other people to go invest in things that may or may not work out. That there is risk to that. So I would say, versus I only pay everything in cash and I don't work the financial system in any way.

So here's what I'm gonna say about debt first, 'cause I work with children and families. Debt is a level three conversation. What's level one? Basic financial competency. If you're not spending less than you make, debt shouldn't be a part of your life.

No.

Get out of debt. Pay off high interest first, get out of debt. Spend less than you make and invest the difference. That's the key to all wealth. This is level one. When you spend, spend on needs first and then wants, right? Save first, pay yourself first. We tell this to children all the time in our bank account for dinner table. and gravy stack, you make 20 bucks, you don't get to spend all 20. You're saving first 20% automatically. You're giving 10% automatically. And then the rest goes into your debit card jar where you're spending on needs first and then wants. And get very clear about what's a need and then what's a want. See, these are level- you- need these.

Nike shoes, do you?

Then level, that's level one. Level two is increasing your value creation. charging for results, not time and effort. The greatest unlock that I ever teach young kids and teenagers, because their parents finally learn it, is to charge for results, not time and effort. I was just coaching a 12-year-old kid in Colorado the other day. Could take me 10 hours or 10 minutes.

If I can get the result done in 10 minutes, that's right. I don't get paid for that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We shouldn't be charging for just showing up and putting in some work. If you want to have a life of wealth, and value creation charge for results.

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This 12-year-old kid was mowing a lawn and he was like, I made $71 today. And I'm like, that's awesome, buddy. Did you work hard? He's like, I worked really hard. I was like, you want to make a thousand tomorrow?

He's like, yes.

I was like, here's what you're gonna do. Tonight, you're gonna go to the next neighborhood and put a piece of paper on all the doors. Say, hi, my name is Brody. I'm going to every door. Tomorrow, and I'd love to mow your lawn and pull some weeds around it for $40. I'll see you tomorrow. He goes around, hits 25 houses in eight hours, whatever it was, nails it all, and he is hustling. But he's sitting there just like, I'm charging for value and the result, not time and effort. So he made $1,000 instead of $71. in a day, and his whole mindset shifted right there. And most parents who hear that, they're like, there's no way that's possible. I'm like, really? Start thinking about value and start thinking about results. I just went to a business and they were gonna pay me like 30 grand to coach them. And I was like, no, I'll take 10% of the upscale of what I do for you. Charge you nothing right now.

Right.

I won't tell you how much we made.

That's great.

They 10x their company.

Wow. That's great.

The company, right?

It's big.

So this is what happens when you think about results, not time and effort.

Wow. So debt as an adult, though, if you're thinking now, level three. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm just. You got me thinking on so many things that I want to be telling kids because I have a huge family call coming. But, yeah, level three. So level three with debt. I am, there's a huge difference between appreciating and depreciating debt. I don't like either of these camps. They're like, it's all or it's nothing. I don't agree with that. There's appreciating debt and there's depreciating debt.

What's the difference?

Depreciating debt is high interest, credit card, shark loans, paydays, this is controversial, college debt. Yeah. See, if you have kids that you think college is good, you might think it's not. Like that's another conversation. But if you're gonna do the college route, you should pay for the last half of college, dollar for dollar, for whatever your kids save and make for it. So now they're hunting for scholarships, they're having multiple jobs and grants. Yeah. They're creating value, they're owning it. And you pay for the last half, 'cause 82% of college kids never get the degree and they get all the debt. Oh man. I'm sorry, 56% graduate, don't graduate but get the debt, 82% never have a job related to their degree. Yeah, that was that for sure.

Which is even worse.

So those are depreciating in a way. Appreciating debt is like, oh, even car loans is a depreciating asset. The car is not going up in value, it's going down.

You keep paying the same payment.

Yep. Now, home or business, if you're securing it, you can cover the payments of it long term. Those are appreciating over time. That's a good thing, right? As long as you're financially competent and you're having really good value creation, right? Like you shouldn't have a mindset for your career as like, I'm just gonna make X amount until I retire at age whatever. You should be constantly thinking of, I'm gonna uplevel my value creation skills in the world, okay? Hone them and drive them and go up and up and up. That's the thinking.

Wow. Okay. That's fascinating. What is the thing that you wish more people knew about around money that most people don't talk about?

Oh, there's so much. It'll never make you happy, okay? I think the reason why money trauma tricks so many people is they think it will fix so many things. And it doesn't. Do you know how many billionaires that I'm trying to coach that are miserable?

Mm. Why are they billionaires miserable?

They're not miserable because of the money. They're miserable because of what the money did.

What did it do?

Ruin their marriage. Kids won't talk to them. What they sacrificed to get there, lost priceless things. So there's a point where you're like, yeah, you got to be fed. You got to be clothed. Probably have good shelter. Do some fun stuff. But that's a smaller number than most people think. What you really should focus on is being rich in relationships. in mindset, in values, in family, belief, those things are what create a wealthy, rich life.

Wow.

I have so many wealthy people that are miserable.

What do they say to you? Someone who's 40, 50, 60 years old, who's got 100 million in the bank or billion dollars in net worth or whatever it might be, but they're on their second or third marriage, their kids don't talk to them, or they just have some weird relationship dynamics that are controlling or power struggle.

Oh, it's not just that their cousins won't talk to them. talk to them. Their siblings are jealous and mad. Their old friends are no longer talking. The air is rare and lonely. That's what it is. Some of these guys and gals, and I was talking to a woman who did it, she's like, I have no one. And it was not because I did anything wrong. I made every dollar fair. I showed up for people. But I am in rare air. I'm at the top of the mountain and it's lonely and I have nobody to unpack this stuff with. and the people that I loved before, I would just want stuff.

They don't understand me.

They don't understand me.

I get to connect with me about this. Yeah.

Loneliness.

So how do you not be lonely and also create financial wealth and abundance at the same time?

Be generous. A family that, if you wanna live.

Together- Pay to a point.

Pay to a point.

Be generous, but pay to a point.

Yeah, baby, Jen. Don't be- No, pay to a point for your kids and then give.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Like you want to be generous. Like, I know billionaire families. The Hobby Lobby family is a great example. They give away billions as a family and they give it together. Gen 2, Gen 3, and now Gen 4 gives together.

How do you give when it's not your money that you didn't make?

Yeah, they help. They have a stewardship mindset. So David Green, who's a good friend, He basically has the kids and grandkids, they get votes on like, Hey, what are we gonna do with this together? And they give together. You wanna live a long time as a legacy family? Give together.

Wow.

Because now you're not having that jealousy and ambition, like selfishness and pride and entitlement and lottery ticket syndrome. You're giving it. You're stewarding it.

I'm not saying this is all mine.

And yeah. And those kids are killers, by the way. I know Derek, the grandson. He's my age. Guys, he's running, he's built up from UPS ground grounds like technician all the way up managing hundreds of millions of dollars. This guy's a killer.

Wow.

So they teach value creation. They're one of the families that we have in our 100. We study it.

If someone has created a lot of value in the world and they've built a business and they've, you know, built something, they've exited, they've got a lot of money and they're running a big organization, that their family just has no clue or has a completely different lifestyle. Just doesn't understand that lifestyle. Nothing right or wrong, just doesn't understand them. And they have isolated themselves financially from their circle, their friends, their family so far that they don't know how to connect with them financially or emotionally anymore. What can they do to start to reconnect with friends, family, and their circle? that has no clue about their financial literacy or abundance on what they've done to get there. Yeah.

I have a lot of families in this boat. They're separated, they're isolated, they're struggling.

Because everybody's- They're lonely, they're divorced, all these things.

Everybody has crazy. Everyone, dude. I had a great uncle that blew himself up through a roof of a barn because he was depressed. We call him Crazy Uncle Dewilde. Did it 100 years ago. Every family has crazy. So I think you have to get to a point where your family, you're okay loving them no matter what.

Mm-.

'Cause there's hurt there, there's trauma there, there's sadness there.

Jealousy.

There's jealousy and pain. You have to almost get to a point where you're gonna love them no matter what. And you have good boundaries, but you have good relationship and you're making the effort. I tell this to families all the time. Rules and relationship together is rocket fuel for children. But if you have rules without relationship, it's rebellion. And this is so true. If you're an older person with siblings and cousins and parents, and you're crushing it, you know, and there's this isolation. You've got to have good boundaries with them and like have the good, the heart and the good conversations with them, but also just focus on the relationships, knowing it's never gonna be perfect.

Yeah.

'Cause you have boundaries around things and just like working on your love. 'Cause parents ask me this all the time. They're like, I feel like they're not listening. I feel like I'm isolated. I feel like my kids don't care. And I say this. When you go fishing with, like if you're trying to build a relationship with your kid, you get points for fishing, not catching fish. Every time you drop the lure and cast the rod, you win, you get points, you have to see it that way, even if they're not biting. And that's true in every relationship. You casting, texting a friend that you know has been struggling or just checking in with someone, the first person to ask for forgiveness in a marriage wins. First person to say, sorry, will you forgive me?

Wins.

Wow. Okay. Even no one wins in marriage, but you get the point. Right, right, right.

Yeah.

These are acts of worship. They're acts of sacrifice. They're fishing. They're like casting the line out. That's what leaders do. And so if you're feeling this way in any situation in your family that's painful, just remember that you get points for like casting a line.

Yes, that's beautiful. This is an HSA1. I've got a few more questions for you. This one's about, choosing your partner, marriage. What are three money questions you should ask the person you're dating and potentially going to get married to before you get married to do your best to set yourself up for harmony and financial peace in the marriage? A lot.

I have more than about 10. One of the best first ones you can talk to someone with is unpack where they came that's, that's, so the question is, how did you grow up around money and what does money mean to your family? What did it mean to you growing up? You're gonna hear a lot. You're gonna know if it was Silver Spoon or if it was hard knock.

Right.

You're gonna hear if it was entitlement or if it was value creation or if it was scarcity, right? Those things manifest themselves all throughout marriages and relationships, and often we find Opposites.

And if someone is an abundance, the.

Hoarder finds the saver.

Yeah. What happens when you're an abundance generous person, value creation individual, and you somehow attracted a person who is scarcity hoarder? Insecure hoarder.

They went from frugal to cheap.

Yeah, exactly. What happens in a marriage when you have those opposites of financial abundance versus scarcity in marriage?

It can be one of the biggest fights. It is one of the number one causes of divorce.

Wow.

When you have an in alignment on money. And so you have to have- you-.

Gotta have those questions.

Real conversation, like real, like, Hey, what we have together, how we buy things, how we make these decisions on investment, house, car, college, like, we both see the accounts together. It's not, you get your own account, I get- I actually say, no, you bring these things together and you have real conversation because it's a partnership. Right, I know you're gonna ask me about prenups, but what I'm saying is when, okay, here's my answer on prenups. You should always marry somebody who's worth more than half your crap.

What do you mean by that?

Always marry somebody who is worth way more than half your crap if it goes wrong.

So, okay, who has? I don't know what that means.

I'm just kidding. There's always margin on this. Yeah, but I'm saying like shit so many and I know we jumped to prenup like yeah, it's all good. What is you've got to be careful though because there's a way to do a prenup that's bad and a way to do a prenup that's good. What's the difference? Okay, a bad prenup is where you're literally like, here's mine, here's yours and this is my insurance if I don't like you anymore. Right. That's bad. But if there's a way to like protect like the children, in a situation, if there's a way to say, hey, this is set aside for our future family, regardless, this is set aside for investment and generosity and giving. Like, here's the, not me protecting myself from you, here's me protecting our future legacy. There's a difference, okay? And this is a longer conversation.

Sure.

But you've got to have those questions about how someone was raised around money. their viewpoint of money, where they want to go in their family. Like, do they want to be at home raising the kids? Do they want to be working, growing, and being the, like, working really hard to provide?

And what are we going to do if we're both working really hard at that? That's right.

You got to have those conversations, because then it's like, well, then do you want someone else raising children? Are you both okay with that? These are hard conversations, man.

You got to make sure you're in alignment.

That's right. the beautiful thing I think about starting from like a point together is that everything you build together is now together. You get to celebrate in that.

But when you got married, I'm assuming you were making more with your business.

12 years ago, I was still on the lower end, thankfully.

So you weren't like balling and she was like making 35 grand a year as a teacher.

Yeah, I was doing, I was just a few years out of college, maybe three years out of college, four years. And I was doing fine. It was six figure, not seven or eight or nine.

-Right.

-Okay.

-It'S a big gap. -Yeah. Yeah.

It's a gap. But again, I was like, you know what? We're gonna start from scratch.

Really?

-Yeah. We're gonna build together everything we have.

When 50% of marriages end in divorce, do you think people should talk about a prenup or have the conversation around what that could look like to make.

Sure- -What did you first say? -A friend of mine built- He said, why do you get married? It's like jumping out of a plane with a parachute that 50% of the time won't open.

You know, it's... Well, the hope that it works.

You hope it opens. Yeah, it's like, he's like, you,'re crazy for getting married.

This is before I got married. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, I honestly don't know what I think on a prenup. Like, I've had so many different valuable points on both sides.

But I'm assuming a lot of them, the families that you've coached or worked with, half of them have gone through a divorce when there's been a lot of money in the bank. Yeah. And there's been a lot of pain.

Dear friends going through it right now.

There's pain and trauma for months and years of figuring out who gets what of the material wealth. Yeah. And that causes wounds and anger and resentment and all these things.

And spoiling and entitlement and victimhood of the children.

And could you eliminate by getting alignment early on of, hey, listen, if for whatever reason this doesn't work out in the future. Yeah. How do we create a win-win? Yeah. Is, you know, is there a conversation that should be had around that? Or you think just suffering 20 years when you get a divorce and just, if it doesn't work out, you know, just put your kids through trauma and put yourself through trauma without having clear agreements. Yeah. If we're not able to work this out in a loving way together, then we've got to this is the way it should be. Let's agree on this. I don't know.

I mean, I've heard so many different things, man. I know you want me to drop on one side or the other, but I'll tell you, my wife and I have had very difficult times. Marriage times.

Really?

Health, misc, yeah. Hard.

Really?

You have a miscarriage and you can't grieve it? One in five women have had it. They're trying to have children. I think that's just one example. You know, crazy death issues of close people to us, business, just multi-year burning hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and driving and hurting and deep pain and 100 hours a week work. That's tough on a marriage. We've had tough. But when we got married, it was like we're burning the ships.

Wow, that's cool.

I asked my grandpa, we should end on this, because I know I got to jump, too. My grandpa, 91 years old, the legend grandpa, the billionaire bank, gave it all away. He's gonna die with almost none. Wow. It's unbelievable, man. I was with him, two weeks ago. I flew up from Phoenix to Oak Harbor, Washington to be with him for the day. 'Cause I knew if I didn't, I'd regret it. 'Cause he's coming to the end. He was married to my grandma for 67 years.

Wow.

She just passed a couple years ago. And he's like waiting to go be with her, right? He's like, I'm gonna go see grandma. And I remember I asked him, what's his best advice? But first I said, Hey, did you ever think about divorcing Grandma? In 67 years, has it ever crossed your mind? He goes, Divorce?

No. Murder. Yeah. Oh my God. But divorce?

Never. Like, he's just like hilarious. And there was this, but it shows the resiliency of it. You know? He's like, We've been to hell and back. through war, and we raised incredible kids and grandkids and great grandkids. If I'd have blown up that dynamite years ago, I'd never seen your face.

Wow.

I said, okay, what's your best advice? Best advice from a 91-year-old man who's seen the whole world? He said, Take things positively. That was it. Take things positively. The best relationship, especially when it comes with money, you win or you learn. You don't win or lose. Every expense in your life is an investment. This is taking things positively. Employees, they're not expenses, they're investments. You lose money on something, you screw up, you make a mistake, guess what? That's a powerful PhD you just got. And sometimes my price tags have been millions. But you have to take things positively. You have to take things positively with your children. Take things positive with your partner. Everything has to be taken in that optimistic, abundant gratitude light.

Yes.

If not, you'll spiral out of control, start blaming each other, start thinking about that eject button, start thinking about like, this is all my money, right? How dare these kids do X, Y, Z. I wish my spouse would only love me in this way. It would fix everything. How dare, you got to take things positively. And so for Amy and I, just back to your question on prenups, we don't have one. We had very little when we started though. She's worth half my crap, I'll just give you that. She's worth more than all I have.

Wow.

I mean, I don't know, there's a beauty in that. I just love the fact that we burned all our ships.

Beautifully.

And we're, and I'll die with her.

Wow.

One of us is going first, but like, we're going no matter what happens.

That's beautiful, man. I've got two final questions for you, but before I ask them, Scott, I want to acknowledge you for the value you add here and the value you add to so many millions of people, parents, kids, and the many millions that you will be adding value to for many years to come. Because I think this is one of the most complicated and challenging topics for people besides love.

Yeah.

Money is challenging and complicated and scary. I think it's scary for a lot of people. Like the fear around, how do we make money? How do I invest money? How do I make sure I don't lose all my money? Yeah. How do I, you know, what do I spend it on?

What are they gonna think of me if I do the wrong thing with.

All these things, man? It's just like there's so much fear around money and insecurity, lack of knowledge and lack of information. and lack of experience that people have with money in general. And, you know, I think love is the greatest thing to explore. And, and about money is a thing that we live with every single day as well. Yeah. And it causes a lot of trauma and sadness in people's lives, and it hurts relationships a lot more than it does help relationships.

Yep.

And it sounds like your adding value for people to learn how to use money to help relationships and make it fun, make relationships fun, families fun.

Totally.

Being a parent fun, being a kid fun, as opposed to being in fear around money. So I want to acknowledge you for your desire to put yourself out there more and not be behind the scenes, but be in front of the scenes and share and use your voice and the decades of wisdom that you learned from your grandfather great grandparents who have brought you this information and this legacy so that others can have harmony around money as well. So I acknowledge you for that, Scott. Where can people go to learn all these things? Because like, I wanna, I don't have kids yet, but I wanna learn more of this. So I'm prepared when I have kids. So how can we figure out the six strategies? How can we figure out how to create a family crest and value system and all these different things?

Yeah, we get a lot of pregnant people, by the way. They're like, oh no, I'm gonna be a dad. I'm gonna be a mom. So we have a, a book Bunch of things. Social media, just, I'm Scott Donald, pretty easy, but we give out daily content. But Dinner Table is really our brand. So we have our 18 strategies in there. We have the home economy. It's a free course we give. So if they go to community.dinnertable.com, and then we'll just do slash Lewis on there. But yeah, community.dinnertable.com, it's our free parenting community. So this is what I'm realizing.

It's a free community.

Yeah, 7 million families that we've served and across all of our companies. The best way that you start doing this and keeping accountable is in groups, coaching with other families, other parents that have kids 5, 10 years older, they're telling you what they did.

Crazier, yeah.

Celebrating wins, asking questions, here's what worked, here's what didn't, and then facilitators that we train up, we call them licensees. So now anyone can license our brand. and have like a six figure business in a box. We give them all the tech on GoHighLevel, all the white label, everything. They give it to their employees, they give it to their clients, they give it to their schools, they give it to their coaching, you know, community, their mastermind. So we're just opening it up as a platform for anybody to take and run with.

Wow.

So if people just go to like dinnertable.com and like send in like a message to learn more about it.

Is there a place they can get like templates and tools as well?

Yeah, we have in that free community, the Dinner Table community, we have the home economy. We'll start with the home economy. It's a free course that we give out to everybody. So it's like, here's how you do expectations, here's how you do expenses, here's how you do extra pay, here's the setup. We have our app that's free that's like the bank.

Got it. So these courses with the strategies and the home economy, that's all in dinnertable.com and they're free.

Community.dinnertable.com go there for the community, go there for the resource. We have Child readiness score. We have our book for a dollar quiz funnel. Wait, what quiz? We have all these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. Just a ton of stuff.

A lot of free courses too, though, teaches. Tons of free stuff. And then if people want to join our live coaching, they just, it's like.

A few hundred bucks.

Sure. And then, yeah. It's like a monthly coaching they get? Yeah, monthly coaching with a bunch of other families. There's like dad groups and there's grandparent groups and there's a special needs group for families. That's cool. Teenager groups, there's single parent groups. Like there's all these different groups that people are forming as licensees. And I'm training and our team trains them on how to facilitate all this coaching. Wow, that's cool, man. They just run with it.

There you go. Scott Donnell on social media, dinnertable.com, community.dinnertable.com/Lewis, all these different places. We'll link it up as well.

But where else can we send people to?

Is this the main place? Yeah, this will be the main spot. Okay, two final questions. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. It's called the Three Truths. It's a hypothetical question. imagine you get to live as long as you want to live. You know, you can live beyond your, your grandfather right now. You need to be 100 something, right? And you actualize all of your biggest dreams times a million. And you have the health, the relationship, the family, the children, the great grandchildren, and the impact that you want to create. And you steward your money and all these different things they happen. the vision that you have for yourself from this moment until that last day. But for whatever reason, in this hypothetical scenario, you have to take all of your work with you. So this content that you're creating and will be creating, we don't have access to it anymore. Hypothetically.

Yep.

All the courses, all the books, all this content, the social media, all of it gone. Hypothetical. But on the last day, you get to leave behind three truths, and this is all the world would have. of your content and your information. Everything that you've gained wisdom on, that you would leave behind. That's it. What would those three truths be for you?

What you don't heal from, you will pass down. Tip well. You can unpack that for a lifetime. And this is the one thing my mom said when she dropped me off for college. She just gave me a big hug. she said, if it doesn't point to Jesus, there's no point.

Wow.

She meant was live a life that loves other people above yourself.

Wow.

Right.

Those are beautiful truths. I don't think I've heard those three before. Before I ask the final question, why tip wealth?

That's what my dad said when he dropped me off for college. In his hand was a $50 bill when he shook it.

There you go.

Well, and the point here is you can't out give God and you want abundance. You want a bigger pie mindset. You want to live this way or this way. Tip well. Care for other people, care for the waitress, care for the Uber driver. I just tipped my Uber driver 98 before I got in here.

Wow.

Like you tip well. and it's a mindset. You pay your people well, you make sure partners do well. Yeah, I pay myself first when I'm building business, but I'm making sure that everyone's taken care of. That's life, Matt. Tip well.

That's beautiful. Final question, Scott. What's your definition of greatness?

Meeting the dream version of yourself at 70 and liking the guy.

There you go, Scott Dunnell. Thanks, man. Appreciate you. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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