From the magazine Unlimited, they have a fascinating story on how to leave a great legacy and the lessons come from looking at how cathedrals were built in the middle ages.
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| Jacoline Loewen |
I also wrote an article for the Globe and Mail on Cathedral building and how similar it is to building a business in that each generation adds a wing or a tower and then passes it along to the next generation to continue the vision. Some cathedrals took hundreds of years to complete which is hard to imagine.
I am complaining about Eglinton Avenue and the time to build the subway so it does make me realize that time is relative.
We are entering an era of Cathedral Wealth, where the most meaningful thing that you can hand down to the next generation is no longer a watch or family estate, but a grand challenge, a life’s work or a multi-generational task.
In the Middle Ages, building a cathedral to honour God was considered one of the greatest works that a community could undertake. Everyone from heads of state and religious leaders to architects, craftsmen and labourers joined together to create these monumental structures.
Building a cathedral was an endeavour of such scale that they would often take decades or even centuries to finish. The people that laid the foundations would do so in the almost certain knowledge that they would never live to see the finished product.
Today, at a time when the future of mankind has never looked more complex and uncertain, we are increasingly realising that our biggest questions may require multi-generational answers.
‘Modernity has pulled us into an era of short-termism and individualism,’ says Rachel Armstrong, senior TED fellow and founder of Black Sky Thinking.
‘However, the biggest issues facing humanity, such as climate change, over-population and energy and resource shortages, require us to think in terms of solutions that will span generations.’
Like the craftsmen that laid the first stones at St Paul’s, St Basil’s and Notre Dame, today’s leading scientists, business leaders and creative innovators are beginning to think in terms of a new kind of wealth – the handing down of purposeful and life-affirming projects that only their grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, will see bear fruit.
‘In the past, your legacy would have been much more about handing down tangible assets, such as cash and bricks and mortar,’ says Ken Forster, angel investor and managing director of Internet of Things solutions company Momenta Partners.
‘Today, it’s about a more organic, more sustainable wealth transfer – leaving your life’s work, something you created, unfinished, and trusting those who follow you to see it through to completion.’
In this report, we examine how Cathedral Wealth and long-termism are beginning to emerge in society in three pivotal ways.
: Creative Cathedrals – the multi-generational projects that are shaping the future of science, technology and design
: Commercial Cathedrals – how the world of business is moving its sights from the next quarter to the next decade and even the next century
: Cultural Cathedrals – why our fascination with long-term cathedral wealth is driving the emergence of new forms of art and culture that will be enjoyed by future generations
