Values

Walk into almost any business and you'll find a list of values on the wall. Integrity. Excellence. Innovation. Courage. They sound good. They photograph well. And most of the time, they're a lie — not because anyone set out to lie, but because nobody picked those words from who they actually are. They picked them from who they thought they should be.

I've worked with enough founders to know the pattern. You build something real, something that works, and then somewhere along the way you sit in a workshop and write down a list of aspirations. Heroic courage. Relentless excellence. Beautiful words. But here's the question almost nobody asks: who in this company actually values that? Because if it's not living inside anyone, it's not a value. It's a poster.

The Success Framework begins here, with Values, for a reason I'll keep coming back to:

A person cannot get where they are going until they know who they are.

Why Values comes first

The Success Framework is built to help businesses, entrepreneurs and driven individuals find out who they are, what they're here to do, and how to get there — in that order. That order isn't decorative. It's the whole thing.

Most people want to skip straight to the "how." Give me the strategy. Give me the tactics. Give me the growth lever. I get it — if you're an entrepreneur at heart, you love the hustle, and the hustle lives in the "how." But every tactic you reach for is downstream of a decision about who you are. Hire the wrong person and it's a values mismatch. Burn out on a client and it's a values violation. Chase the wrong opportunity and it's because you never got clear on what you're actually here to do.

So we start at the top. Values underpin who you are at your core. Get them right and everything that follows — your purpose, your vision, your brand, your strategy — has something solid to be built on. Get them wrong, or fake them, and every layer above inherits the distortion. You won't feel it on day one. You'll feel it eighteen months later, as attrition, resentment, and that quiet sense that you've built a business that doesn't feel like you.

What a value actually is

Here's my definition, and it's deliberately uncomfortable: a value is something that, when it's present, makes the work feel alive — and when it's violated, makes you want to walk out the door.

That second half is the part most people skip. Values aren't just the good stuff you want around you. They're also the lines that, when crossed, end the relationship. I can tell you the fastest thing that would make me quit a client: money manipulation. Fraud. Putting profit ahead of people, ahead of relationships, ahead of doing the right thing. The moment I see it, the connection is gone. Flip that over and you find the value underneath — operating ethically. That threshold tells me as much about who I am as any peak moment ever could.

And here's the part that surprises people. Your core values were mostly set a long time ago — well before you ever started a business. The sociologist Morris Massey described three windows that shape us: from birth to about seven, we simply absorb everything — family, school, faith, all of it pours in unfiltered. From eight to thirteen, we model the people around us. From thirteen to twenty-one, we work out how we fit into the world. By twenty-one, the core of who you are is essentially locked in. The Dunedin study — one of the longest-running studies of human development on the planet, tracking a thousand people since 1972 — found you can already see distinct personality types crystallising between the ages of nought and four.

Sit with what that means for a second. Your values aren't a decision you make in a workshop. They're already in there. The work isn't to choose them. The work is to find them.

You don't brainstorm values — you uncover them

This is where my method parts ways with almost everyone else's. The standard approach is to hand you a list of nice words and ask you to circle the ones you like. That just gives you back your conscious, top-of-mind thoughts — the things you think you should say. It's an aspiration pick-list, and it's worthless.

Real values live underneath that. They're mostly unconscious, which means you can't reason your way to them. You have to go and find them in the one place they've left their fingerprints: your memories.

So the process looks nothing like brainstorming. You go back to a specific moment in your career when you were totally, completely motivated — fully alive in the work. You close your eyes and you step into it. Not watching yourself from the outside, but looking through your own eyes. Seeing what you saw. Hearing what you heard. Feeling what you felt. And then — this is the move that matters — you rewind the tape just a beat, to the instant before the peak, and you notice the emotion that was sitting there. That feeling, the one just underneath the high, is usually the genuine value. Name it, and you've pulled something true up from below the waterline.

I won't pretend it's comfortable. When I run this with people I'm sitting right there, helping draw it out. On your own it's harder, because there's a part of you that wants to declare "I already know my values, they're these three things" and move on. Don't. That's the conscious mind trying to rescue you from the work. The truth lives a few layers down, and you only reach it through repetition — asking the same question again and again, writing until the obvious answers run dry and the real ones start to surface. The discipline of staying in the chair past the point of comfort is most of the job.

What it looks like when it's done

When I run my own values through this process, here's what comes out: authenticity, pragmatism, courage, family, fortitude, principled, learning, honesty. Those aren't words I admired and adopted. They're the things that, when they're present in my work and the people I work with, make me feel switched on — and when they're absent, make me lose the connection entirely.

Take courage. I didn't pick that because it sounds heroic. It's there because I can point to the exact moments in my life where it showed up and shaped me — where doing the frightening thing was the only thing that felt right. That's the test for whether a value is real: can you tell me about a specific time you lived it? If you can't, it's not a value yet. It's an aspiration wearing a value's clothes.

And this is the difference that makes the whole thing worth doing. A real values list isn't symbolic — it's operational. It's how you decide who to hire and who to let go. It's how you build a culture people actually want to be inside. It's the filter you run every big decision through. Once you know your true values, hiring gets easier, firing gets easier, and a thousand small choices stop being agonising because you've already decided who you are.

Aspirations have their place — I'll champion the big, audacious version of who you want to become. But only after you've found the bedrock. You can't build toward who you want to be until you're honest about who you already are.

Where this leaves you

So here's the question to sit with, and I'd genuinely encourage you not to answer it in five seconds: think of a moment in your career when you were completely, totally motivated. Step into it. What was the feeling just before the peak? That's a thread worth pulling.

Values are only the first step of The Success Framework — the foundation of the identity stack. From here we build purpose, vision and legacy on top of it, and only then do we get to the strategy and the doing. But none of it holds without this layer underneath.

If something in this landed — if you read "a list of aspirations nobody actually lives" and recognised your own wall — then you're exactly the kind of person the rest of this framework is built for. Keep going. The next step is working out not just who you are, but what you're here to do.