I have started doing the Great Game of Thrones Rewatch hashtag #GoTRewatch, prompted by my good friend, Anne Tegtmeier, of Fan Fare Theme Catering. (She will actually be doing weekly recaps as a book-reading, show-obsessing, total nerd, whose entire business is based on throwing the nerdiest of parties for people who love geek culture. Before she started her business, we used to throw Game of Thrones parties, and she’d make most of the food, including the pièce de resistance, the Wall of Ice Cream and Fire, an ice cream cake that she’d light on fire like a Baked Alaska.) The idea of the rewatch is that if you watch two episodes per week, you’ll have caught up in time for the premiere of the final season, set to air in April of 2019. Wow, what a trip to watch it again from the beginning.

Now you might be thinking, “Candice, what the heck does Game of Thrones have to do with estate or business planning?” Hear me out. It has a lot to do with it. And you might as well get used to hearing about it, because rewatching this show might be my primary inspiration over the next year to write about estate and business planning.

When I’ve watched Game of Thrones, I always thought about how estate and business planning relate to the show. But I never sat down to write out my thoughts. This is my chance to actually go through and recapture all of the thoughts I had over the years—except with added perspective and experience—and share with you all of the lessons you can learn from this extraordinary show when it comes to estate and business planning.

Of course, what I’m reliving by watching the show is trauma—so many bad things happen. It’s super interesting to see the violence and misogyny that existed not just in the Game of Thrones world, but in the minds of the writers, directors, and producers of the show, before they gained some perspective and tapered a lot of that down and found avenues for some of the disenfranchised characters to find some power. Seeing all of the foreshadowing, knowing what is to come, is brutal and intense. There is so much that I overlooked before. 

Hindsight is a real thing, huh? 

In the beginning of the show, I tended to think about the characters like I think about myself, my family, and the people that I care about: We are all going to make it, right? No matter how much practical planning I embark on because it’s smart, I still have this underlying belief that the good people win, they live, they prosper. And that’s just not true, is it? And I know that, because in my own life, the most wonderful person in my life—my mother—did not live. But believing in these clichés and platitudes is so tempting, isn’t it?

And that’s where planning comes in. All of these characters kept overlooking signs, gut feelings, warnings. But what if they had sat with those feelings and played them out to the end? How much differently could things have gone? If you’re here reading this blog or email, you’ve thought about the fact that you could face hardship, adversity, even death. Will your family rewatch your life seven years later and wish you had done things differently? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Anyone who has loved ones can make plans to care for those loved ones after you’re gone. Anyone with a business can make plans to avoid losing everything if you’re sued. 

A big part of Game of Thrones is finding out who the fools are. Don’t be a fool.