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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part I: The Family Mission Statement
Brett Anderson & Thomas Kostigen
12/01/2003
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The following article is an excerpt from The 100 Year Plan series from the December, January, February and March editions of Robb Report Worth. To subscribe or to order back issues, please call (800) 777-1851 or order online now.
Who We Are
To its human characters there is salvation in nothing else in the universe," wrote Baroness Karen Blixen in the 1950s. "For within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of the heart of its characters, that one cry of the heart of each them: Who am I?"
 For Blixen, the story was indeed her salvation. The author of Out of Africa, daughter of an aristocratic family, found her true vocation, after the failure of her coffee farm in Kenya, writing tales inspired by the adventures of her grandfather—a soldier and landowner who knew Hans Christian Andersen—and her father, Wilhelm Dinesen, who, under the nom de plume "Boganis," wrote of his travels in 19th-century French Canada and the American Far West. Intensely proud of her father and conscious of her heritage, she listened at her father’s knee to accounts of his exploits, and this identification with the Dinesen legend would manifest itself in the name under which she published her writings, Isak Dinesen.
The past can be a powerful resource for meeting challenges. Franklin Delano Roosevelt often remarked on the qualities he shared with the risk takers, entrepreneurs, and deal makers of the Delano clan. He loved to hear his grandfather, Warren Delano II, who made his fortune in the China trade, talk of seafaring ancestors, such as Amasa Delano, who circled the globe three times and who was the first to copy down an account from the mutinous survivors of the Bounty. Roosevelt’s fascination with this history influenced his later decision to seek the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy (one his cousin, Theodore, had held decades before); but more importantly, the values and traditions he carried with him from these sagas gave him the strength of character, the moral fortitude, to stand his ground during the most difficult hours of his presidency.
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