As someone building a global hospitality empire, working shoulder to shoulder, day in and day out in the trenches with his father and siblings, Shivang gives one of the realest takes I’ve ever heard on a perennial question that millennial and Gen Z rising gens often ask:
How do you grow out of this shadow of your family? How did your parents motivate you to do better than them?
May I present below two key quotes from his response that deeply resonated with my quests for legitimacy as a rising gen working for my father and my uncle in their single family office:
You have to be comfortable in the fact that you are going to be in the shadow for a long time.
Years ago, I remember learning about my family’s entrepreneurial feats for the first time and wondering if I could pull off anything remotely close.
My grandfather bet on Chinese real estate as early as the late 1980s, took his company public together with my father and my uncle, exited the property development business in 2014 before the downturn, and created generational wealth in the process.
Almost worth documenting in a book… which our family eventually did.
You've got to believe in yourself enough that whatever they built, you're going to do 3x, 5x, 10x of that.
Until that happens, be comfortable being in the shadow.
Bad news: I haven’t tripled my family’s portfolio yet, let alone achieve a 5x or a 10x.
Good news: I believe I have what it takes to safeguard my family’s wealth for two more generations. All I need is a set of reasonable requirements and time.
After six years of working for my family, I believe this self-belief has slowly overpowered:
my obsession with proving myself to my father and my uncle
my inability to gracefully accept favours from my family
my unease with the ‘nextgen’ label my peers and wider society assigns to me.
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