These values are posted in our home.
Our family is on a continuous journey to discover, learn, and articulate our values, always seeking to convert what we value into how we act.
We focus on building and maintaining the right “inputs” — daily actions and habits — required to live each day in accordance with our values. We are confident that grooming the right daily actions and habits will produce “outputs” we desire — often in ways we cannot predict — but that ultimately will result in lives well lived.
It is our intention to be able to look back on our lives and see a virtuous cycle of continually improving what we value and refining our actions to align with those values. When we reach the end of our lives and reflect upon them, we expect to see our lives as great adventures, and be prepared for the life to come.
Love God
- Meditate on the Gospel. Demonstrate the Gospel.
- Cultivate rightly ordered loves [1]
- Participate in the global church
Build up our family
- Build and operate from a strong foundation
- Demonstrate love, joy, and grace
- 3x experience (anticipation, participation, remembrance) [2]
Do as we would be done by
- Rigorously apply the golden rule
- Focus on positive sum games and win-win partnerships
- Lead where needed. "Teach others to fish."
- Be generous with our time, talents and treasure
- Build relationships with people we like, trust, and admire [3]
Be wise stewards of our bodies
- Eat (real) food. Mostly plants. Not too much. [4]
- Sleep well, stay active and don't ignore preventative maintenance
- Monitor our health and investigate anomalies
Be wise stewards of our minds
- Maintain a growth mentality, a big-picture perspective, and the longest view in the room
- Be forward-thinking, positive individuals [5]
- Operate from a latticework of mental models [6]
- Stay curious. Learn, build, share, repeat. [7]
Be intentional with our time
- Live life backwards. Minimize regrets.
- Seize the present and relentlessly build the future
- Pursue simplicity on the far side of complexity
- Practice functional minimalism
- Operate with leverage
Use our resources to live out our values
- Use possessions as tools, enjoy as gifts, and dispose of idols
- Invest like optimists; save like pessimists. [8]
- Do the job we would do even if we didn't have to work [9]
- Act like we own it
Notes and references
[1] Great framework from Augustine: "But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally." (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)
[2] Thanks, Steven Covey
[3] Thanks, Warren Buffett
[4] Thanks, Michael Pollan
[5] Thanks, Dad
[6] Thanks, Charlie Munger
[7] Thanks, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[8] Thanks, Morgan Housel
[9] Thanks again, Warren
Last updated: 2021 (v4)
Prior versions: 2018 (v3), 2016 (v2), 2014 (v1)