We are often asked about the process through which we arrived at our family values.
After deciding to live from a set of values, we took an hour each day during a holiday, started with a blank sheet of paper, and wrote down everything we could think of that answered the question, “What do we value?”
The result was about five pages of values.
Then we tried to live them out.
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. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28
We found that some values were far, far, far, more important than others. Augustine’s framework of “rightly ordered loves”, shown above, became extremely useful as we worked through which values superseded others.
On the next holiday we repeated the blank-sheet-of-paper exercise, seeking to refine and distill our initial five pages of values.
The result was about four pages of values.
Then we went back to living them out.
Success is iterative (so iterate).
We repeated this process on the next holiday, resulting in three pages of values, and went back to living those out.
We did it again. Two pages.
And again.
And again.
After five substantial iterations over five years of holidays we had distilled our values down to a single page.
Those are the values seen on this site, which are also displayed in the entryway of our home.
As with planning, the exercise itself was as important as the resulting document.
We have found we are generally closely aligned with each other, are able to make enormous decisions quickly, have a sense of whether we feel we are living life well, and have a broader calmness about the path and progress of our lives — all of which have come from seeking to center ourselves in our family values.