Values are the settings you pick before the game starts, so you’re not deciding everything under pressure.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
Deciding in advance is how you avoid making your real choices while tired, outnumbered and rushed. Pressure is a terrible environment for thinking, and in the moment the most persuasive argument is usually whichever one ends the discomfort fastest. A setting chosen beforehand does the deciding for you and turns the moment into paperwork.
Pick two or three things you will not do, before any situation arrives, and keep them specific rather than noble. Say them to yourself now. When it comes up, you are following a decision instead of making one.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Which rules did you set before the pressure showed up?
MORE IN MEANING & PERSPECTIVE
- Sit in an airport for an hour. Goodbyes, reunions and fresh starts, all in one room. Your story is one of many.
- There’s a kid a few years behind you who needs exactly what you had to figure out alone. Go be that shortcut.
- You’re one thread in something huge. That doesn’t make you small. It makes you part of something.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.