The Family Crest
Not that long ago, families held to pretty rigid identities that were more or less generational. Their faith was passed down, and often so were things like level of educational attainment, career choice, and geographical location. You were born in a certain family, in a certain spot in the country, and that family farmed, or worked with their hands, or went to college, and there wasn’t much opportunity to break out of that mold.
That has changed for large swaths of people, thankfully. We have now an almost infinite number of choices—faith, career, romantic partner, where we live, how we choose to dress, etc. And this is mostly good. More choices means more opportunities, more room for finding who you truly are.
But it can also leave us feeling a bit unmoored sometimes. The Harvard Business Review summarized a study on the benefits of choice. For the study, researchers placed a table full of jams for sampling at an upscale food market. On one day, the table held a remarkable variety—24 different jams—and shoppers were given a coupon if they sampled and purchased a jam that day. On the next day, the table held only 6 different jams. More choices, more purchasing, right? Wrong. The table with 24 jams saw far more people stop and sample, but led to only 10% of the sales of the table with only 6 jams.
The Harvard Business Review summarizes that other studies have found similar results: more choices do not always lead to better outcomes.
This is called “choice paralysis,” or what happens when people face so many choices that they cannot make a decision. Interestingly, even when they do make a decision, those confronted with a larger variety of options sometimes end up feeling more dissatisfied with their decision—even if it was the right one.
For marketers, the message is clear: options are good, up to a point, but after that point offering more choices actually leaves people feeling more confused and less satisfied. The message translates from business to everyday life.
Most of us have been in a spot in life wherein our choices haven’t quite worked out, and we have been left feeling lost, or like we don’t really know ourselves. Families operate like this, also. Why, a child might ask, do we behave in a certain way? Why do we move a lot? Or why do we stay in one town? Why is being outside so important? Why do I have to eat this? Why do we visit Grandma and Grandpa? Why are we volunteering at a homeless shelter this weekend, or cleaning up alongside a roadway, or going camping, or taking swimming lessons?
This is why it is so crucial to develop a sense of family identity—we behave this way because in our family, we value adventure, or mobility, or localism, or the environment, or health, or service. When we identify our values, often we find that individual choices regarding, for example, whether to go visit relatives or catch up on work on a particular weekend, make more sense. It might become easier to decide whether to send our kids to private school or public, or whether to save for a bigger house or save for a much-needed family vacation or save to pay off some nagging debt. All of these may be good or legitimate behaviors, but one at a particular time might be more in line with our core family values.
There is no better image of family identity than the family crest, which appears in the FamilyWorks logo. In history, crests were used to identify families—on them were pictured things that were important to that particular family, and they were emblazoned onto clothing, buildings, and artwork. In our logo’s crest, we have identified four different values that we as a company believe are particularly important to us, values that help us to help your family. These values are belonging, mastery, innovation, and control. Our team selected these four values when we were forging our company identity. Here’s a brief overview of our values:
Belonging (Upper Left): FamilyWorks helps increase the sense of belonging in a family unit, by uniting the individual family members behind a shared vision.
Mastery (Upper Right): We want you to be able to trust our researched-backed methods, to feel like we have mastery of subject areas so we can better help you, and to give you a sense of mastering your own family’s purpose.
Innovation (Lower Left): FamilyWorks is a tech company seeking to come up with new and dramatically different ways to help families create and live out their own identities.
Control (Lower Right): FamilyWorks seeks to give your family a sense of control over daily activities, choices, and goals, so you can decide what is really important, and weed out the rest.