Two Words in a Harvard Hallway | Loeb House
I stepped out for coffee. That’s it. That’s the origin story. Not a board meeting. Not a grant proposal. Not a strategic initiative with a twelve-month runway and a steering committee.
A cup of coffee. A hallway. Two strangers mid-sentence. And two words that stopped me cold: human renaissance. It was May 2. The Flourishing at Work Summit, hosted by the Harvard Human Flourishing Program. I had spent the morning with CEOs and scholars circling a question that refuses to stay academic: What does it actually mean for a human being to thrive? Aristotle asked it. Adam Smith wrestled with it. Your grandmother knew the answer but never wrote it down. Twenty-four centuries later, we’re still asking because the answer keeps slipping through our metrics.
I needed caffeine. So I walked out. In the hallway, I passed two people deep in conversation. I caught a phrase. Stopped. Turned. “Are you talking about the Human Renaissance project at Oxford?” They were. Fifteen minutes later, we had decided to write something together. That something became Flourishing Performance Indicators: A New Framework for Wealth and Legacy—a collaboration between me, Cale Dowell of Arkos Global Advisors, and Matthew T. Lee, Director of the Flourishing Network at Harvard and Professor at Baylor University.
Today, I announce its birth: Flourishing Performance Indicators™. A new way to measure what money cannot count.
The Haunting Number
Ninety percent. That’s how many wealthy families lose everything by the third generation. Not to bad markets. Not to bad advice. To silence. To secrets. To the slow bleed of we don’t talk about that. Three generations. That’s all it takes for a fortune to become a cautionary tale.
But here’s what the research actually shows: the money doesn’t disappear because of poor investments. It disappears because the family does. Communication breaks down. Heirs arrive unprepared. Purpose was never articulated, so it couldn’t be inherited. The problem was never the portfolio. The problem is that we’ve spent 250 years measuring what’s easy to count—returns, ratios, basis points—while ignoring what actually holds a family together. Trust. Character. Belonging. The things that don’t fit on a balance sheet. We optimized the spreadsheet. We neglected the soul. And so the wealth passes down. But the why doesn’t. The children inherit the money. They never inherit the meaning.
Here’s the question no one wants to ask: What if the greatest risk to your wealth isn’t out there—but around your own dinner table?
A Different Kind of Metric
Let me be clear: FPIs don’t replace financial indicators. They complete them. For too long, we’ve treated wealth as the root and everything else as the fruit. We had it backwards. Wealth is the fruit. Character, purpose, connection—these are the roots. And when the roots rot, no amount of pruning the branches will save the tree.
Drawing on the Global Flourishing Study—the most ambitious longitudinal study of human flourishing ever conducted—we identified six essential domains. Six roots beneath the visible tree of legacy:
Psychological. The inner life. Clarity amid noise. Resilience when the market turns—or the marriage strains. Hope that isn’t naive.
Physical. The body that carries everything else.
Purpose. The shared why that outlives any single generation. Without it, heirs inherit assets but not direction.
Principles. Character. Integrity. The quiet virtues that outlast trends, scandals, and market cycles.
People. Relationships. Belonging. The faces around the table—and whether they still want to be there.
Prosperity. Yes, financial stability. But notice where it falls: last. A means, not an end. A tool, not a telos.
These aren’t soft metrics. They’re the hard ones we’ve been avoiding. Research shows families strong in these domains don’t just feel better. They sustain wealth longer. Navigate transitions more gracefully. Build legacies that outlast balance sheets. Flourishing, it turns out, is measurable. And what’s measurable can be cultivated.
Why Now
We are living through the greatest wealth transfer in human history. $84 trillion. Not million. Not billion. Trillion—with a T. Moving from one generation to the next by 2045. Quietly. Inevitably. Often without a map. For families of significant wealth—and for the advisors who serve them—this is a hinge point. A threshold. The kind of moment that doesn’t announce itself until it’s passed. The old playbook won’t work. You cannot optimize your way to a flourishing family. You cannot tax-strategy your children into purpose. You cannot diversify your portfolio and expect your grandchildren to know who they are. Telos—the Greek word for ultimate purpose—is what’s missing. We’ve made financial success the telos of our lives. But money is a tool, not a destination. A means, not an end.
FPIs offer a different question. Not just how much do we have? But how are we doing? Not just, are we secure? But are we free?
Wait, Tell Me More
I often think about that hallway. What if I hadn’t needed coffee? What if I had walked past without stopping? The best collaborations begin this way. Not in calendared meetings, but in the margins. In the space between sessions. In the willingness to stop and say, “Wait. Tell me more.”
Emmanuel Levinas wrote that the encounter with another face is the beginning of ethics. The face says, “Here I am. Do not pass me by.” I almost passed them by.
Cale knows where the money goes. Trusts. Structures. Succession. The technical architecture that moves wealth from one generation to the next. But he also knows the silence that follows when families stop talking, and how no legal document can fix what dinner conversations couldn’t.
Matt knows what flourishing looks like under a microscope. Decades of research. Peer-reviewed. Longitudinal. He helped build the Global Flourishing Study, the largest scientific attempt in history to answer an ancient question: What does it mean to live well?
I know what happens when disciplines refuse to speak to each other. And I’ve spent my life forcing the conversation. Philosophy and finance. Science and art. The academy and the boardroom. Not because the conversation is easy. But because the silence is costly.
We didn’t collaborate because we agreed on everything. We collaborated because we couldn’t answer the question alone.
An Invitation
The article is now available as a special report from the Institute for Global Flourishing at Baylor University. It includes the full FPI framework, sample survey instruments, practical guidance, and the tree metaphor that makes the whole system breathe. But a framework is only as valuable as the families who use it.
So here’s my invitation:
If you’re a family leader, set aside 60 minutes. Reflect on the six domains. Where are you strong? Where are you fragile? What would your children say?
If you’re an advisor: Introduce FPIs to your client families. Help them measure what actually matters, not instead of financial metrics, but alongside them.
If you’re a rising generation inheritor, don’t wait to be invited. Ask your family the question they may be afraid to ask themselves: What does flourishing look like for us?
Legacy isn’t built through documents. It’s built through decisions. And the most important decision is to redefine what success looks like and how you’ll measure it.
Acknowledgments
We thank Byron R. Johnson, Anne White, and James E. Hughes, Jr. for their encouragement and support. We are grateful to the research team leading the Global Flourishing Study, and to their partners and funders, for generating new insights about flourishing across diverse populations worldwide. Special thanks to Tyler VanderWeele for his conceptualization and assessment of flourishing, which inspired the Global Flourishing Study and sustains a growing network of scholars committed to this work.
The full article, Flourishing Performance Indicators: A New Framework for Wealth and Legacy, is available as a special report from the Institute for Global Flourishing at Baylor University.