EXCERPTS
"If you haven't thought of yourself as a leader before, you better start coming to terms with it. Leadership comes in many forms, and sometime in our lives (if not on a daily basis) we all must find the ability to listen, learn, think, decide, act, and lead. As an inheritor, not only are you forbidden to weasel out of this requirement, you must step up almost immediately.
Certain clocks begin ticking from the moment inheritors come into a fortune. Sometimes the stopwatch has already begun months or years earlier; sometimes before you were born. Stopwatch or time bomb? It's more like a stopwatch, but just for fun let's pretend it's a bomb.
Many inherited benefits have time limits, eligibility windows, and details that evolve (or vanish) over time. Federal law, for instance, has a set time period for accepting or disclaiming the benefits provided by a will. Most beneficiaries of trusts, as another example, have different levels of access to their funds as they reach certain ages. Remember how Lance unwittingly signed away his rights to a full third of his fortune? That was back when he turned 21, and it was a time-sensitive decision on which he didn't receive full disclosure from his family office.
An example that faces every inheritor is the array of tax questions that surround any wealth transfer. Tax benefits and liabilities vary with the tax codes, which can seem to change with the winds. Certain combined tax liabilities are now over 70 percent (as just one example of the variables), so failing to understand your tax options relatively quickly can drastically affect your financial picture (in ways with which only your friendly taxing authorities would be pleased).
Assuming you accept this urgency, defusing your own peculiar time bombs is going to require leadership. You might be tempted to jump in there like the movie hero and start clipping wires, but here's where the time-bomb ruse ends. Please recall my introduction's "don't panic" clause: You of all people can afford to take the time to get these decisions right. And that means becoming a leader.
When training firms consult with high-level business leaders, one of the first required skills is the concept of vision or, more accurately, the ability to envision. The reason envisioning is so critical to leadership is the simple assumption that we all want to go somewhere interesting. If you don't want interest in your life, leadership is not required: Knock yourself out as the world's most accomplished couch potato. For the rest of us, interest comes from new experiences and curiosity about the unknown. Go marching into the unknown, and you better be packing either foolish bravado or leadership skills. The bravado angle may be fun for a while, but it's leadership—that calming, motivational influence of any great leader—that makes for exciting new experiences that actually turn out well.
That's why academic studies of successful leaders (and their admiring flocks) have identified "envisioning" as leadership skill No. 1. Envisioning is the ability to imagine a destination, a goal, an outcome that is not within plain sight. For people in motion, adventurers who actually chase after those visions, this has an interesting corollary: When you achieve your vision, it's time to envision something new, further out there, more interesting. So the envisioning task is never done.
That's an important realization. It utterly debunks all your hopes for an easy way out. Again, if you want easy, surf the couch. If you want to lead a more interesting, satisfying, regret-free life than that, then paddle out to the big waves: Step up and lead."