Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
Your Family Already Has Values. You've Just Never Named Them.
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Your Family Already Has Values. You've Just Never Named Them. Read time: 5 minutes Hey, welcome back. Last week, I talked about being unremarkable and why it was one of the best things anyone has ever called me. You can read that (and all past issues, here) This week I want to tell you about an afternoon that's become one of the best things we've done as a family, and how you can do a version of it whether you've got three kids, a partner, a flatmate, or just yourself. The confession that started it. We have values for everything in my life. Heights has company values and we argued over them for weeks. Melissa and I run our marriage on OKRs (I wrote a whole newsletter about that, yes, we're those people). I've got a word for the year. I've got daily reflective prompts stuck to my mirror. And then one morning it hit me. My own family, the four of us, the actual point of all of it, had never decided what we stand for. We had a vibe. We had habits. But we'd never said out loud, on purpose, "this is who we are." We were running the most important thing in our lives entirely on default settings. So we fixed it. In one afternoon. With a jar. The jar I got a jar and a stack of paper hearts. Then Melissa, Margot (she's four) and I, with baby Kaia mostly chewing the hearts, each wrote down the moments we feel happiest as a family. One per heart. Drop it in the jar. No discussion, no judging, no "good answers." The rule was simple: there are no wrong answers. Especially from the four-year-old. Margot wrote that her favourite thing is "looking after our two cheeky cats." Mel wrote, "both girls cuddling in bed with me." I wrote, "all of us in the park together with friends, no rushing." We added the holidays, the Saturday morning routine, the saying sorry when we get it wrong, the cooking together, the not watching much telly. Twenty minutes. A jar full of hearts. A four year old who thought she was just doing crafts. And then I did the bit I couldn't do in my own head. I typed every single answer into Claude and asked it one thing: find the patterns in this, and turn them into values a four-year-old can actually understand and feel. Not corporate words. I could see there was gold in that jar. But I was too close to see the shape of it. When you're inside your own family, it's almost impossible to step back and name what makes you, you. It came back with five threads, named in Margot's language, not mine: We do life together, and together is our favourite place. I read them back and got a bit emotional, honestly. Because they were true. They weren't aspirational nonsense off a Pinterest board. They were us, on a good day, written down for the first time. We painted them. Margot pressed her thumbprint on the poster. It's on the wall now. Why this matters more than it sounds Every group of people has a culture. Your family, your relationship, your team, your friendship group, your own internal life. The only question is whether that culture happened to you or whether you built it on purpose. Most of us let it happen to us. We absorb our parents' patterns, good and bad. We drift. We react. And then one day we look up and wonder why our home feels a certain way, and we never once chose it. Naming your values doesn't magically make you live them. But it gives you a reference point. A place to come back to when you've drifted. When I'm short-tempered and rushing everyone out the door, "together is our favourite place" is sitting on the wall, calling me out. When Margot's having a wobble about trying something new, we've got language for it: "we give things a real go." You can't course correct toward a destination you've never named. And kids don't learn values from lectures. They learn them from repetition and from watching you. A four-year-old doesn't know what "integrity" means. But she absolutely knows what it feels like when Daddy says sorry after losing his temper. That's the value, in the wild, doing its job. How to do this yourself (this weekend, honestly) You don't need a framework. You need a jar and an hour. Gather the raw material. Get everyone to answer a few simple questions on bits of paper. "When did you feel happiest with us this week?" "What do we do that you love?" "What makes us us?" Drop them in the jar. Don't analyse out loud, just collect. The patterns are the point. Find the threads. This is the bit most people skip and it's where the whole thing falls apart. You're too close to your own life to see it clearly. So get a second pair of eyes. Your partner, a friend, or do what I did and paste the answers into Claude and ask it to cluster them and name each theme in plain, warm, human language. Aim for four or five. Few enough to remember on one hand. Translate, don't corporate-ify. Don't write "Integrity." Write "we tell the truth, even when it's hard." A value is good if a child could understand it and it would genuinely change a decision you make as an adult. If it fails either test, bin it. Make it physical. Paint it, print it, stick it on the fridge. A value on a wall is a value you'll remember. A value in a Google Doc is a value you'll forget by Tuesday. "But I don't have kids" Stay with me, because this is for you too. Values aren't a parenting thing. They're a living on purpose thing. The exercise works for almost any version of your life. On your own? Do it solo. Write down the moments in the last month you felt most like yourself. Then find the threads. That's your personal operating system, and most people reach 40 without ever writing it down. (I did the jar version of this on a psychedelic retreat last year, minus the jar. Same idea: get the raw material out of your head so you can finally see it.) Got a partner, no kids? Even better. Do it as a couple. What do you two stand for? What's your "we"? This is exactly how Melissa and I started with our relationship OKRs, and it's the single most useful thing we've done for our marriage. Live with mates? Run a team? Have a tight friendship group? Same exercise. Ask everyone what they love about how you do things together, find the threads, name them. I've watched founders spend fortunes on culture consultants when an honest hour and a jar would've got them 80% of the way there. The format flexes. The principle doesn't: name what you're already living, on purpose, with the people who matter. The hard part: actually living them The afternoon is the easy bit. The values only mean something if they show up on a wet Tuesday when everyone's tired and the baby's been up since five. So this is how we're keeping them alive. Repeat them. Every single night, Margot and I say our five values at bedtime. It takes ninety seconds. She's started finishing the sentences before I do. "We always come back to..." and she shouts "KIND!" That repetition is doing more than any lecture ever could. She's not memorising words. She's building an identity. Catch them in the wild. When you spot someone living a value, name it out loud. "That was so kind, that's exactly who we are." Caught behaviour beats taught behaviour every time. Kids and adults repeat what gets noticed. Repair when you break them. You'll break them. I break "together is our favourite place" every time I sneak a glance at Slack during dinner. The value isn't there to make you perfect. It's there so you notice the gap and close it, out loud, with a sorry. That's value number four doing its job on me. Review them. We'll redo the jar every year. Kaia gets a vote next time. Values aren't set in stone. They grow with you. The point isn't to get them right forever. It's to keep choosing them. The bit that stuck with me A few nights ago Margot was being unkind to a friend, and before I said anything, she stopped, looked at me, and said: "I came back to kind, daddy." She's four. She doesn't know what a value is. But she knows who her family is. Because we finally bothered to tell her. You're running a culture whether you've named it or not. In your home, your relationship, your own head. You can let it happen to you. Or you can spend one honest afternoon, a jar, and a bit of paint, and choose it. I know which one I'd pick. See you next week. Dan P.S. If you do this, with your family, your partner, or just yourself, hit reply and tell me your five. I read every single one. |
Dan Murray
Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
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