Who Chose My Values?

Values are the invisible architecture of our lives — quietly shaping every decision, relationship, and priority we hold. In Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty, the opening chapter challenges readers to ask a question most of us have never seriously considered: Who decided what I value? This post explores the key themes from that chapter, offering reflections drawn from a life of six decades, thirty-three surgeries, career highs, personal failures, and more second chances than I deserve.

Understanding Where Our Values Come From

Before we can live with intention, we have to understand where our values were planted. Jay Shetty suggests that our values are shaped by whatever consistently absorbs our minds — and that many of us have never consciously chosen them. Here are some key points to consider:

• Inherited Values: Many of our deepest convictions were shaped by parents, teachers, church leaders, and employers — often before we had the maturity to examine them. They became part of us without ever being chosen.

• Values Revealed Through Crisis: Life has a way of sorting out what truly matters. Health challenges, loss, and failure have a remarkable ability to clarify which values we were actually living by versus the ones we said we held.

• The Drift Toward Lower Values: Shetty contrasts higher values — gratitude, compassion, integrity, service — with lower ones like ego, greed, and envy. The sobering truth is that we drift toward one set or the other not through grand decisions, but through small daily ones.

The Weight of Opinions, Expectations, and

Obligations

One of the most convicting concepts in the chapter is what Shetty calls OEOs — Opinions, Expectations, and Obligations. These are the voices that quietly hijack our sense of direction.

• Living by Expectation: Many of us pursue goals because they're impressive, buy things because they're admired, and chase recognition because it feels validating. Meanwhile, the values that matter most wait quietly in the background.

• The Approval Trap: There was a time when I measured success by career advancement, financial security, and the approval of others. Those things aren't inherently wrong — but life taught me they weren't the whole story.

• Learning to Filter: The challenge isn't eliminating external voices. That's impossible. The challenge is learning to distinguish between what the world expects from us and what we genuinely believe matters. That may be one of the hardest parts of adulthood.

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The People Who Reveal Our Deepest Values

Shetty offers a quiet but powerful observation: the qualities we admire most in others often reveal our own deepest values. That's worth sitting with.

• Admiring Character Over Status: When I look at the people I respect most, it's never their titles or net worth that stand out. It's integrity. Perseverance. Humility. Compassion. The willingness to keep moving forward after falling.

• Quiet Service: The people who inspire me most tend to serve others without needing recognition. That consistency points to something genuine — a value that doesn't depend on an audience.

• A Mirror for Growth: Perhaps the qualities we most admire in others are simply the values we hope to continue growing within ourselves.

Planting Trees Whose Shade We May Never Sit Under

One of the most resonant images in the chapter is the idea of planting trees for future generations — investing in things that outlive us. The older I get, the more I think about this.

• Legacy Through People: The most meaningful things I've done in my life have had very little to do with titles or accomplishments. They've had everything to do with people — helping someone believe in themselves again, listening when someone needed to be heard, being present for my children and grandchildren.

• Seeds We Don't Always See Grow: A ten-minute conversation can influence someone for years. A kind word, offered at exactly the right moment, may land in a way we never know. A lesson learned through hardship may one day help someone else through their own.

• Investing in What Outlives Us: Every day, whether we're aware of it or not, we are planting something. The question is whether we're being intentional about what we sow.

What Our Lives Actually Reveal

Shetty's chapter closes with a challenge that has stayed with me. It's not enough to know what we say we value, or what others think we value. The real test is what our lives actually reveal.

• Choices as Votes: Every choice we make is a vote for the person we are becoming. How we spend our time, money, and attention tells a more honest story than any list of values we might write down.

• The Gap Between Words and Actions: It's easy to say faith, family, and integrity are our highest values. It's another thing to examine a week's worth of decisions and see if the evidence agrees.

• An Ongoing Examination: This isn't a question to answer once. It's a question worth returning to throughout the rest of our lives — not with shame, but with honesty and a genuine desire to grow.

Conclusion: A Call to Live With Intention

Think Like a Monk has already done something valuable in just its first chapter — it has invited me to examine something I don't think about often enough. Not whether my values are the right values in some abstract sense, but whether the life I'm living is actually shaped by the values I claim to hold.

In your own life, consider who — or what — has been shaping your values. Reflect on the gap between the values you profess and the choices you make. Pay attention to the people you admire and what that admiration reveals. And ask yourself: what am I planting today, and for whom?

Those are questions worth revisiting — not just while reading a book, but throughout the rest of your life.