Writing a Mission, Principles, and Values for Your Family

Have you considered explicitly writing out the mission, principles, and values for your family? About a year ago, my wife and I had some big changes in life: a young child, living in a new state, planting some roots. It seemed like an apropos time to make a declaration of sorts of our family mission, principles, and values so that we could point back to the document, as both it and our family evolve over time.

Since then, it has paid dividends. It is shocking how often we have referenced, and found grounding direction in that document. Its statements comprise the emotional, moral, ethical, and spiritual core of our family.

In this post, I want to share them with you and reflect on some stories we’ve experienced since.

Our mission, principles, and values are blatantly modelled after those set by Bryan Cantrill and his company, Oxide, with tweaks to make them more family-relevant.

Our mission

“Kick butt, have fun, don’t cheat, and find happiness together.”

Kick butt

We believe in working hard and achieving excellence.

Have fun

We believe that our family journey is most fulfilling when it is fun, and that humor is essential for humility in good times and endurance in the hard ones.

Don’t cheat

We believe in playing by the rules in both letter and spirit. If we don’t like the rules, we work openly and collaboratively to improve them.

Find happiness together

We believe the family unit cannot experience its full measure of happiness unless each constituent is happy and thriving. This means we exercise utmost transparency with our own concerns and deep empathy for another’s struggles.

Our principles

Principles are fundamental, universal truths that transcend time, geography, culture, and context.

These are not aspirations, they are constraints; we expect them to be the marrow of our family and adhered to under all conditions.

Integrity

Principles are meaningless without the integrity to uphold them; we view our integrity as our single-most important principle. We do not sacrifice our principles for expediency or comfort.

Honesty

We seek and tell the truth, even where those truths are painful or inconvenient. We abide by the spirit of the truth, not merely its letter; we do not hide falsehoods in language that is technically true or otherwise misleading.

Decency

We treat others with dignity, be they family, stranger, community, or competitor.

Our values

Unlike principles, values indicate relative importance: they are objectives rather than constraints, and can come into tension with one another.

Indeed, many of these values can become pathological when taken to an illogical extreme; absolute adherence to a particular value should never trump prudence.

Candor

We believe in being forthright, even when that’s difficult. We avoid euphemism or otherwise cloaking our opinions or experience. We respect those who speak candidly, even if we disagree with what they are saying.

Courage

We are bold, willing to do things even if they are unconventional, difficult, scary, or otherwise unproven. We are not, however, foolhardy: where we are contrarian, it comes not from mere desire to take a less traveled path, but from a deep and well-informed conviction.

Curiosity

We are lifetime learners, unafraid of learning something new—be it an intimidating new language, a perplexing puzzle, or a novel technology.

Diversity

We believe the best results come from combining different perspectives and uniting them with shared values and mission. We believe in and encourage diversity on any axis that remains consistent with our mission, principles, and values.

Empathy

To find happiness together effectively, we must be able to see the world through the eyes of others. Empathy doesn’t merely inform our behavior, it guides our interactions with our family and community: we treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated.

Humor

While living life is serious business, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We enjoy the company of our family, and cannot imagine a day without laughing.

Optimism

While our lives are often filled with figuring out why things will fail, we nonetheless retain a deep and fundamental belief that better things are possible.

Resilience

We believe in the words of the late mathematician Piet Hein: “problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.” We persist even when problems are fighting back, pushing through the disappointment and setbacks endemic to environment and our chosen domains.

Responsibility

We feel a duty to things larger than ourselves. We don’t merely fulfill our obligations, but actively seek ways we can help. We balance our professional responsibilities with our personal and familial ones, and we honor those who do the same.

Rigor

We are disciplined and thorough in our approach to problems. We insist on getting at the root of things, and are unsatisfied to merely address their symptoms.

Teamwork

We are intensely team-oriented people: we draw strength and inspiration from each other and our community. We like to collaborate, and believe that our best work comes when we work not merely together but for one another.

Thriftiness

We believe in spending wisely, seeking to make our finite resources last as long as possible, while still making the necessary investments to achieve our mission. Our shared thriftiness allows us to empower ourselves to make the right spending decisions.

Transparency

We believe that secrets are often corrosive—and that our family operates most effectively when we are aware of broader context. We err on the side of transparency and communication: every family member should feel that there is a standing invitation to discuss and collaborate on any issues. At the same time, we are respectful of privacy: personal issues should remain private.

Urgency

We have finite resources and limited time with which to achieve our mission; we must be focused in our approach however immense the task at hand. Urgency should not be conflated with pace; it is important to move deliberately rather than hastily.

Versatility

While we must naturally specialize, our mission also demands that any of us may need to adapt or apply ourselves in a new way—and indeed, that many of us will be doing this much of the time.

Conclusion

I honestly feel motivated and often inspired by these statements. We initially set up this document with the thought that “in the future”, we wanted our children to be able to point to this as we resolved disagreements (e.g., “Dad, you said we could go to the Museum this weekend if finished my homework. I’m showing responsibility, and it would contribute to curiosity!”). Sure, while we still hope this document comes in to play in the future, it is shocking how often it has come into play for just me and my wife now.

There have been times at 3am, when we’re both up and frustrated and helping the baby where a reminder like “Teamwork, we’re on the same team”, or “problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back”, bolsters our resolve.

When we had our 10-year wedding anniversary, and reflected on the past decade, it was shocking how frequently references to this document appeared for both of us. It echoed things we admired about each other, our relationship, and our experiences.

There have been times when friends tell us about some scenario they are dealing with and ask what they should do. For us, the answer is often surprisingly clear just based on our principles and values. In fact, in some cases, it’s been a shockingly effective line of thought to ask them to enumerate some of theirs, and then ask them what action would best align with their principles and values.

We’ve all heard cliché lines like, “in this family, we …”, followed by some statement (in the worst cases, often pulled from thin air in the heat of a disagreement). With a document like this, I hope it’s very clear that in this family, we have integrity, honesty, and treat people with decency. Furthermore, we have a lot of things we value, and recognize that while they are objectives, not constraints, they point us in the direction we would like to go.

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