It was the early 1990s. I was a fresh college graduate. Like many fresh-outs, I wasn't sure what to do with my life. I was passionate about people but didn't know how to turn that into a career. Becoming a psychologist was an option, but the life of a therapist was unappealing.

I felt very lost.

In my quest to match my passion with a career, I returned to my roots. My grandfather was a county judge in Ohio; my father was an attorney for Northern Trust in Chicago; my brother, a paralegal, was on track to become a lawyer. So what was my natural conclusion? Pursue law. I tested out the idea as a paralegal.

While working as a paralegal, I traveled to San Francisco to meet with a client. It was April of 1992. I remember it clearly. While I wasn't particularly enthralled with the work, I felt important as a 22-year-old flying cross-country to hobnob with attorneys and business people from a large multinational corporation. One night, while I sat in my hotel room at the Hyatt Embarcadero, the phone rang. It was my father. I knew something was wrong. My father never called. Normally, my mother called and handed the phone to my father: “Here, talk to your son.”

My father (age 52), who had quit smoking 15 years before, said he had lung cancer.

I was shocked. Then I, along with my mother and two brothers (I am the middle child), rallied around the idea that it could be treated. My father would beat the cancer.

Slowly, it became clear that he would not. The weekend of July 4th 1992, my father was determined to get up to our summer home in Wisconsin for our annual family vacation. Because he was undeterred, we flew him up from Chicago. It was a short-lived and frightening vacation. He was hospitalized and then Medivacced to Chicago. For the next month, our family life was organized around getting our work done as quickly as possible, so we could spend as much time as possible with him at the hospital.

One month later, on August 6, my father asked me to stay a little later during my visit. My brothers and mother had left. Something weighed on him. He had some requests. His final one was to tell me that he was passing 100 percent of his ownership in the family business (a family farm) to me and not splitting it among me and my brothers.

I was incredulous: “We have a family business?” My father had spent much of his life insulating us from the pressures and challenges of working with family. He hadn't told us anything about the farm that he co-owned with his brother and cousins. Surprised with this revelation, I left the hospital, my head spinning with a list of things to do to help my dad.

That was the night he died.

On August 7, 1992, I woke up, a newly minted family business owner. While dealing with the grief of losing my father, I also grappled with the new challenge of understanding the family business. Although his one-sixth ownership wasn't Walmart money, it came with a set of expectations and responsibilities that I wasn't fully prepared for at the tender age of 22.

My father was the one to whom all of the cousins looked for input and advice. He was the one whom they trusted to make the right decisions. Now, they started to look to me to play the same role. But I was not my father. I had a psychology and music background; he was a tax attorney. I wondered how I could possibly take on this role.

Feeding the self-doubt were questions about why my father picked me and not one of my brothers. Most people, as I did, thought that my older brother, Bryan, would be the logical choice. He was the oldest and on the path to becoming an attorney. For whatever reason, my father chose me.

This was the beginning of my path to and passion for family business. Five years later, after pursuing additional education at Northwestern University, I landed at the Loyola University Chicago Family Business Center. Here, I was first exposed to the challenges of family business successors through the Next Generation Leadership Institute—an 18-month leadership development course specifically designed to help successors in a family business become the best leader that they can be—not the leader that their parents want them to be, but a leader that is true to him- or herself. A leader that leads with authenticity.

Leading this program for the last 18 years while helping it to grow and evolve, as well as witnessing the transformations in the leaders going through the program, inspired me to write this book. I am passionate about helping the world to not stereotype the family business successor as an unqualified, lazy person who got the job only because of his or her last name. I want the world to understand that the vast majority of successors are qualified; they work hard; and they only want success for their families and the people whom their business supports.

The world needs to understand the challenge that successors face in finding their own voice and establishing credibility with themselves and with others.

The stories of the successors in this book show a commitment to excellence, not entitlement; they reveal the humanity of having to grow up in the shadow of parents, grandparents, and others whom the world celebrates and mythologizes as all-powerful leaders.

We all face this challenge in some form: whether choosing our career versus those of our parents; taking the place of a mentor who helped shape who we are; or trying to repeat our parents' success as an actor, athlete, politician, or businessperson. The challenge is how to become one's own person in the shadow of those who have gone before.

We are all born into a story already being told. We are all, to some extent, following in the footsteps of those who went before us. At its heart, this book is about how one develops a unique sense of his or her identity without losing the connection to the family and what has gone before.

Although this book is written for the family business successor and his or her family, I hope that every reader can relate to the challenge of having to establish his or her sense of identity, credibility, and confidence in a world that wants to celebrate the past at the expense of creating the future.