On a Tuesday more than forty years ago, an American lawyer in his early thirties named James Hughes was sitting on the thirteenth floor of a New York law office, trying to be invisible. He was one...
On a Tuesday more than forty years ago, an American lawyer in his early thirties named James Hughes was sitting on the thirteenth floor of a New York law office, trying to be invisible. He was one week away from a partnership election, the moment his whole career had pointed toward, and the unwritten rule for a man in his position was to do nothing, say nothing, and survive the week. Instead, a partner walked into his office and said, "Jay, we want you to go to Singapore on Saturday." A client there wanted to talk to him. A client he had never met and had never heard of.
In those days you could walk to Fifth Avenue and get a passport in an afternoon, so he did. He went home to his wife and three small children, and together they opened an atlas to find out where Daddy was going. On Saturday morning he flew, and in his own telling he "flew and flew and flew and flew and flew," landing in Singapore on Sunday afternoon with no idea why he was there. The client's office was nearly bare: couches pushed far to the side, one large oil painting of a man Hughes later learned was the client's father, and a single chair a long walk from the door. He was offered tea, and then a cigar, which he accepted even though he did not smoke cigars. And then the wealthy Chinese businessman across from him explained the summons. "We Chinese have a proverb," he said. "Shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves in three generations." Then the assignment: "I want you to tell me what the families in the West do to avoid this. I don't want my family to have this outcome."
The story is told in full in Passing the Torch: Preserving Family Wealth Beyond the Third Generation (2018), the book on family wealth psychology by the South African psychologist Ilze Alberts, who gives Hughes an entire interview chapter and lets him tell it himself. Hughes went home, and the question swallowed his life. Six months to the day, he returned to Singapore. The client asked if he had the answer. He said no, and the client said he was very disappointed. But Hughes had found something else, something he considered bigger than an answer. "What I can tell you," he said, "is that in six months I've discovered that every culture on earth has this proverb, every single one. Rags to riches to rags, clogs to clogs, rice paddy to rice paddy, stable boy to horseman to stable boy. Every culture on earth has the proverb." And then he said the sentence that he admits has stayed in front of him for more than forty years since: "This fate cannot be overcome, but it's possible to avoid it."
Alberts opens her own book with a version of the same catalogue. In Japan, she notes, the expression is "rice paddies to rice paddies in three generations." The Scottish say, "The father buys, the son builds, the grandchild sells, and his son begs." In China, "Wealth never survives three generations." The English version, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, gave the pattern its name in the literature. One buys the land, one builds on it, one loses it. The costume changes; the play does not.
Sit with what that universality means if you are reading this from the diaspora. Many of our readers have absorbed, from a hundred directions, the idea that wealth failing to last is somehow an African condition. It arrives dressed as economics commentary, as jokes at family gatherings, as the weary line that "we don't do generational wealth," as the quiet dread underneath black tax, the expected remittances a first earner sends home. The suspicion takes root that other people's families compound while ours reset to zero, and that the resetting is something in us.
Hughes's six months of research says otherwise, flatly. Scotland resets. Japan resets. China resets, and feared the resetting enough that a Singapore billionaire flew a stranger across the world to ask about it. The three-generation cycle is not an African fragility. It is a human pattern, documented on every continent, in cultures that held wealth for centuries and in cultures that never colonized or were colonized by anyone. Whatever version of the proverb your grandmother used, in whatever language she used it, she was not confessing a weakness of her people. She was reciting, independently, the same observation the Scots and the Japanese arrived at. That reframe matters because shame is a terrible foundation for planning. A family that believes it is uniquely cursed either surrenders to the curse or exhausts itself denying it. A family that knows it faces the ordinary, universal gravity that every wealthy family on earth faces can do what Hughes told his client: stop trying to overcome the fate and start working to avoid it.
Now the disclosure this essay owes you, because we hold our sources to the same standard we hold family stories. Ilze Alberts is South African, and her book is genuinely useful. But a reader who picks it up hoping for African substance should know exactly what is and is not inside. In roughly 59,000 words, the specifically African content amounts to this: the author's own family story, one recurring client story about a man who immigrated from Cyprus to South Africa, and a passing mention of the heart surgeon Chris Barnard. That is the list. The case studies are Rockefeller, Kennedy, Rothschild, Gates, Buffett, and a Japanese construction dynasty. The two long interviews are with two Americans. There is no ubuntu, no indigenous wealth practice, no African saying even in the proverb catalogue. When this journal brings the book to an African table, we are doing translation, not reporting, and we would rather tell you that plainly than let a South African author's name imply a sourcing that is not on the page.
So why build an African-facing essay on it at all? Because the book's single most useful move for us is not African material. It is a license. If every culture on earth has this proverb, every single one, then your family's version, in Luo or Twi or Yoruba or Amharic or Swahili, is a full citizen of this literature, exactly as weighty as the Scottish quatrain and the Japanese rice paddies. Nobody has collected it into a Wiley hardcover yet. That is a gap in the world's bookshelf, not a gap in your family's wisdom. And as we will see at the end, closing that gap for your own family is work you can do this month, without waiting for any publisher.
It is worth looking closely at the little African-set material the book contains, because both stories earn their keep. The first is the author's own, told in her preface, and it is the reason the book exists. "My father grew up with wealth," Alberts writes, "yet when he died, he was financially dependent on his children." Her parents were the third generation. The family fortune was gone, and the daughter of that loss became a psychologist who spent her career trying to understand the machinery of it. She is candid that the void drives her: whatever we perceive to be missing, we strive to fill. Her book is the proverb's third act, written by someone who lived inside it, and it happens to have taken place in South Africa while being, in its structure, the same story told in Glasgow and Osaka.
The second story is the closest thing the book has to an African anchor, and Alberts tells it twice. A client of hers, the father of a family she works with, left Cyprus at fourteen years old. He could not speak English. He arrived in South Africa alone, "with nothing and nobody," as she puts it, and the emptiness of that arrival became the engine of his life. He is in his late seventies now, and the wealth his family holds was built entirely out of that void. It is a South African story in setting, but read it again and you will recognize it as something else: a migration story. First act of the proverb, the shirtsleeves generation, the one who crosses with nothing.
Which is to say: the book's one recurring African-set case study is a mirror held up to every diaspora reader. If you are building in London or Houston or Berlin while your family watches from home, you are the fourteen-year-old on the boat. You are living the first act right now.
Here the book stops, and we go one step further, because the diaspora case sharpens the proverb rather than escaping it. The first generation abroad carries the void with them: the memory of what was lacking, the school fees that once went unpaid, the reason for leaving. That void, as Alberts argues throughout the book, is the fuel. But the second generation, raised in Ohio or Manchester with heating that works and a school that simply continues, inherits the wealth without the void. They did not cross anything. That is not a moral failing of diaspora children; it is the proverb's exact setup, the same one that undid the third generation of Alberts's own family on another continent. Distance adds its own accelerant: the grandchildren may lose the language the family's wisdom is stored in, which means the sayings that carried the warning cannot even reach them.
Hughes offers one strange comfort here, from the same interview. The proverb, he says, never names its deadline. It promises the return to shirtsleeves but not the date, and in his words, "every family has free will as to when." The third generation of the proverb is not necessarily your third generation. Families postpone the fate, sometimes for centuries, and the ones that do, he found, share a habit: they keep making new "matter" out of their energy, and the matter is not money. It is people, formed deliberately, generation after generation, by families that never stop telling their own story.
Which brings us to the work, and it is pleasingly concrete. The world's bookshelf is missing the African wing of the proverb catalogue, and no one is better placed to write your family's page of it than you. The Wisdom Library in LegacyPot exists for exactly this: the sayings, warnings, and stories your family actually uses, kept in the language they were made in.
This month, collect your family's version. Call the oldest person who will pick up, in whatever country they are in, and ask two questions. What did we say about money that does not last, about wealth and the generations? And who did you first hear it about? The second question matters more than the first, because proverbs in living families are rarely abstract; they have a name attached, a cautionary uncle, a farm that was sold, a shop that died with its founder. Record the saying in its original language, add a translation for the grandchildren who will need one, and write the story beside it. If your family genuinely has no such saying, record that too, along with the story of the nearest loss or the nearest survival, because the pattern will be there even where the proverb never formed.
An entry like that does two jobs at once. It warns, the way the Singapore businessman wanted his family warned. And it dignifies: it proves, in your family's own words, that your language has been thinking about this problem exactly as long as Scotland has. The diaspora child who one day opens the Wisdom Library and finds the proverb in Grandmother's own phrasing, with Grandmother's own cautionary tale attached, inherits both the warning and the standing to take it seriously.
Do the collection this month. One call, two questions, one Wisdom Library entry: the saying in its own language, the translation, the name and story attached, and the date you captured it. If your family spans countries, assign one collector per country and compare the versions; the differences will tell you what each branch feared most. Then, at the next gathering, read the entry aloud and add Hughes's finding beside it, so the family hears both truths in one sitting: every culture on earth carries this proverb, and every family holds the free will to decide when, if ever, it comes true for them. The fate cannot be overcome. It can be avoided. Your grandmother, it turns out, had already published on the subject. She was just waiting for the family to start keeping the journal.