Do you know the first and last names of each of your 8 Great Grandparents?

Greg McKeown asks this excellent question in a podcast discussing his wonderful book Essentialism and it has stuck with me ever since.

For most of the population, our inability to answer this is its own lesson.

We cannot even name the first and last names of the people that made us everything we are. When you think about it, it’s extraordinary.

Our story doesn't start at our birth, our life is formed in its past.

Where we live, the country in which we were born and the languages we speak – everything was determined by them or largely influenced by the decisions these eight people made and we don’t even know their names!

How did their decisions impact us, our grandparents and our parents?

In general, most of us know a lot more about our grandparents, but what do you really know? What positive things did they do, and what challenges did they face? Meaning to or almost always not meaning to, you have been impacted by their character and the decisions they all made. It’s true for almost everyone.

How does that filter down to our identity today and influence who we are?

Their struggles, the difficult choices they made and the skeletons contained in all our family trees. How much of our identity is unconsciously influenced by luck, random events, and the history and values of those who came before us?

Relocation, success, bad fortune, illness, love, loss, and wars. Choices that have filtered into the very DNA of who we are and what we believe today.

I can only ask these questions rhetorically, as I'm left now with one parent. Life is fragile; time is precious. Don't leave asking your questions until it is too late.