Good thoughts.

People have an innate desire to pass on what they know because 1. sharing information is a way to achieve status and 2. we want to pass on our legacy to our children and tribe to promote the success of our genes. So this offers a few things that students can provide in addition to money: they can help establish the teacher’s status, and they can help establish the teacher’s legacy.

A teacher gains status from the their students. One way to be a good student is to be very conscious of who we are learning from and try to raise their status with others. The more legitimacy you have, the more you can give, even if you have a different kind.

On the legacy side, your dad knows a few things. Have you sat down with him and had a talk about how you are going to carry on his legacy? Not just the business, but the wisdom and thinking patterns that led to his success?

Another thing that comes to mind is a bit of a tangent. There is a world of knowledge out there and knowing how to pick up new patterns is very useful knowledge in itself. I have been struggling with the idea of what kind of knowledge and culture should be passed down and preserved within a family as opposed to in the broader cultural context. Perhaps one thing that could be part of a family culture is a system for figuring out what we need to know and where to learn it from.