The Strongest Emotions

The strongest emotions aren’t about winning. They’re not about freedom.

They’re about children.

We don’t always get it right. With our children, especially, we don’t always get it right. Time—we didn’t give enough. Money—we may have given too much. We made things too easy, or too hard. We were too focused on ourselves. Or too focused on them—we caught them before they could fall.

We just wish we had supported them differently.

But they grew up. And we can’t go back.

There are even relationships we can no longer repair—not directly.

This happens to powerful people. Maybe especially to powerful people.

There was a time in my life when I felt powerful.

But it didn’t start that way. What I remember most from my childhood was the physical labor. Starting around age 10, I dug trenches to lay drain tile, painted barns, mowed lawns, split wood. Every dollar I had, I earned. When I broke a window, I paid. Crashed a car, I paid.

Once, on Father’s Day, a local news reporter stuck a news camera in my face. He asked me if there was a message I would like to tell my father on this special day. I said, “I wish he wouldn’t make my brother and me work so hard.” When this aired on the nightly news, believe me, it was not the feel-good story of the week.

But by age 45, I had turned a fundraising career into a comfortable life. I convinced myself I was incredibly grateful for a childhood that gave me character. That, plus a great education, led to prosperity.

But my children’s lives looked easy to me—way too easy. I thought hardship built character, so I tried to give my son some of what I had. I was too hard on him in his critical teenage years. If my wife hadn’t intervened, I might have thrown away my relationship with him altogether.

I tried to course-correct while I still had time. I am optimistic that I did.

Sometimes there isn’t time. Sometimes a loved one has passed away. A personal relationship can’t be repaired.

But we can still repair something.

Through philanthropy and volunteering, we can be who we wish we had been the first time—through young people we’ll never fully know, but whose lives can still be changed. We can be more present, more generous, kinder.

In philanthropy, we don’t get a perfect do-over. But we can get close.

Repair and redemption are not side effects of philanthropy.

They are often the main point.

Over time, donors stop trying to win arguments, fix problems, or prove something.

They start trying to reconcile their lives.

And maybe their children, and grandchildren—and even society—will see them differently because of it.

In many of the largest gifts I studied, the children were part of the decision—often in a decisive way. Not as observers, but as participants. In some cases, the gift would not have happened without them.

This is where legacy begins.

It’s not what they leave to children.

It’s what they leave in them.

All of these feelings are amplified by mortality.

The largest gifts tend to come at the moment when time is no longer abstract—it becomes finite. At that point, donors often drive the pace more than the institution does.

The question is no longer how this will make them feel.

It becomes: What will remain?

Institutions that were here long before them will still be here long after them. They outlast any one life. They amplify many lives. Donors take pride—and comfort—in having their name associated with something like that.

But leaving a transformational legacy is not just about what is left behind.

It is what they are trying to make true about their life before they are gone.

There was one more pattern that showed up, which surprised me.

A meaningful share of the largest donors did not have living children. And yet they were still making their largest gifts to institutions that shape the lives of young people.

The money had to go somewhere. They had infinite choice in where to give it.

They invested not in their own children, but in everyone else’s.