Your values are the case on your phone. You don’t admire them daily; you just survive the drop.

Principles are not there to be admired, they are there for the day something goes wrong. Most of the time they feel unnecessary and slightly inconvenient, which is precisely what prevention feels like when it is working. You learn what they were for in one bad moment rather than gradually. By then there is no time to put them in place.

Set the standards while nothing is happening, since that is the only moment it is possible. Do not judge them by how useful they feel on an ordinary day. Judge them by what they hold when something drops.