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I learned values before I knew the word.
They were present in the village where I grew up — in who was trusted, in who was watched, what earned approval, and what brought punishment. Few were named. None were debatable. They felt like facts of life.
They weren’t discussed.
They were enforced. By force.
As a child, values were not ideas to examine. They were the air you breathed — and the boundaries you didn’t cross.
I was born into a Catholic family. Church wasn’t a place we visited. It was a center of gravity — where values were spoken, normalized, and justified.
Even then, I sensed something subtle:
the values spoken in church were not always the ones lived in the neighborhood. Sometimes, not even under my mother’s breath in church.
I didn’t yet outwardly question that gap. But something lodged quietly in me — the sense that values could exist as words, separate from behavior.
I left the islands when I was eight.
By then, some values had begun to take form as explicit ideas: honesty, not stealing, telling the truth, doing the “right thing.”
Unknowingly, I carried them with me like universal constants, assuming they would work the same way wherever we landed. That honesty would be rewarded. That hard work would be recognized. That doing the right thing would lead to a good life.
But the ground had changed.
The spoken values were familiar.
The reality was not.
What counted as good shifted. What earned respect shifted. What created opportunity shifted.
That first winter in Somerville, Massachusetts, my parents had me sneak into donation boxes in the dark of night so we could have warm clothes.
They were asking me to steal.
I couldn’t explain what that did inside me. I only knew it crossed something that had been made very clear.
I did it.
And I felt something I didn’t yet know how to name.
I see now how much shame I carried from that moment — how deeply it stayed with me — because I’ve never shared this story before.
That was the first sense of being out of sync.
If values were universal truths, they wouldn’t work this way.
They wouldn’t bend so easily with context, or depend on how cold we were.
Something else was at work.
A few years later in California, I was asked by Father Garcia to become an altar boy.
He had helped our family — with food, with community, with care when we needed it. He knew our names. He looked my parents in the eye.
Saying yes felt right. Not because I felt called, but because it was how you showed respect. How you honored your parents. How you stayed in good standing.
It was also how you learned obedience.
A good son listened.
A good worker followed instructions.
A good man did what was expected.
These weren’t just virtues. They were guardrails. They gave shape to belonging.
Then something shifted.
Another priest entered the picture. He drove a white Cadillac with a high-end sound system. It wasn’t hidden.
Father Garcia’s life had felt aligned — quiet, consistent, grounded in care.
This didn’t.
It wasn’t the car itself that unsettled me. It was the disconnect.
The words were still spoken.
The rituals still performed.
The authority still intact.
But something no longer fit.
I didn’t leave in anger. I didn’t make a statement. I just stopped going.
Looking back, I see that moment clearly now. It wasn’t rebellion. It was recognition.
For the first time, I understood — viscerally — that values could be spoken aloud and still fail to guide behavior.
And once you’ve sensed that, it’s hard to pretend you haven’t.
In my thirties, values returned in work life — this time as corporate strategy.
We spent days in offsites writing mission statements and defining our values. We printed them on walls and embedded them in onboarding decks.
Integrity.
Respect.
Transparency.
Excellence.
Again, I believed in them. I wanted to.
But a familiar pattern emerged.
The values stayed fixed.
Behavior changed with circumstance.
More recently, I studied the stated values of Fortune 500 companies. Most listed five or six. Integrity appeared more than any other.
What I found was not scandalous.
It was more ordinary.
Many of these same companies spent millions developing aggressive tax avoidance strategies — not illegally, just carefully.
The pattern was always the same:
Values were aspirational.
Behavior was contextual.
And when the two came into conflict, values lost.
That’s when the realization settled — not as judgment, but as clarity:
These aren’t natural laws.
They’re stories.
Good stories. Powerful ones.
But stories nonetheless.
They are visions of who we should be — not descriptions of who we are in a given moment.
Life doesn’t live in ideals. It lives in reality.
What strikes me now is not that I was taught the wrong values.
It’s that I was never taught to look at life itself.
I was taught stories — beliefs, moral visions, rules about who we should be. But no one pointed to the living reality underneath them: needs, limits, tradeoffs, consequences.
No one said: watch what life does when it is under strain.
Notice what breaks — and why.
When those questions surfaced, I was redirected back to the stories: that’s just how the world works.
I spent decades trying to live up to ideals that were never capable of carrying the weight we put on them.
This is where the distinction finally became clear to me.
There are different ways of seeing the world.
Through the Story Lens, we see the world through values and ideologies. We declare them, enforce alignment, and use them to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. They promise coherence and control — until life moves.
Through the Life Lens, we look somewhere else.
We pay attention to what’s actually happening.
Who is affected.
What is being strained.
What is adapting.
What is trying to continue.
This doesn’t eliminate stories.
It grounds them.
Stories become tools, not truths.
Guides, not governors.
I now see values differently.
They are dreams humanity has always carried — images of who we hope to become.
Care.
Honesty.
Fairness.
They aren’t rules life follows.
They’re aspirations we long to live into.
Care emerges in vulnerability.
Honesty in the need for trust.
Fairness when cooperation must endure.
Life doesn’t obey values.
Life integrates them — or exposes them when they no longer fit.
My own story has come full circle.
I grew up surrounded by values.
I organized my life by them.
I built companies around them.
And slowly, I realized I had spent my life standing on reflections instead of reality.
Life was always there — beneath the stories — adapting, responding, finding ways to continue.
I just hadn’t been taught to see it.
Learning to see life as a living process — not an idea — has changed how I relate to work, power, leadership, and community.
A natural question follows from this: if values are stories, how do we do good?
I don’t see this as removing morality, but as grounding it closer to reality. Morality doesn’t originate in stories; it emerges from life itself — from vulnerability, interdependence, and consequence. Stories and values symbolize these patterns, but they are not the patterns themselves.
When values are treated as fixed truths, they often override what is actually happening. When life becomes the reference point, care doesn’t disappear — it becomes situational, responsive, and accountable to impact.
Doing good stops being about conforming to ideals and starts being about paying attention to what life needs in a given moment.
I’m not suggesting we abandon values.
I’m suggesting we stop asking them to do work they can’t do.
What happens if we let life be the reference point — and values remain provisional, revisable stories?
What happens if our organizations are designed to respond to reality instead of conform to ideals?
Seeing through the Life Lens doesn’t give us answers.
It gives us something better:
the ability to notice — and stay in sync.
And once you learn to see life this way, it’s very hard to go back.