This article was written by the original owner of startupguide.com, Ryan Allis, and published on his website in 2012. Read more about why Ryan was happy to hand over his website domain to us here.

The most important person a leader needs is himself or herself. Without values, it is hard to know what you stand for, where you want to go, and the type of change you wish to make in the world. Without values, a leader will find it hard to find followers who are intrinsically motivated and inspired by the direction they are taking their team in.

Some of our values are inherited, from our families, our schools, our cultures, and the people who have shaped and influenced our thinking. As we mature, we have the opportunity to consciously choose our values, rather than blindly accepting those that have been given to us.

Often, as part of our transition to adulthood, we reject the values we have been given in order to seek out our own. To some degree, our values change throughout our lifetime, but there may be certain core principles that remain constant.

Values you have consciously chosen, as a result of deep thought and consideration, are the most powerful. They can help you to stay on course through life’s challenges and guide you in making difficult decisions.

When it comes to values, originality is not always a virtue. My core value, the one I hold above all others, is one that has been expressed for thousands of years in most of the great wisdom traditions, from ancient Greece, India, Egypt, China, and Babylon, to all of the major Axial Age religions. It’s so universal that it has come to be known as the Golden Rule (also called the “ethic of reciprocity”): “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

Treat other people as you would want to be treated. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” as the Bible puts it. What could be a more fundamental value than that?

It draws on our human capacity for empathy, for understanding and feeling another person’s perspective and experience. It also demands that we recognize the selfhood and intrinsic value of the other person. This, I believe, is the most important value to strive to live by. As they say in Silicon Valley, all else is hackable.

Treat other people as you would want to be treated… This, I believe, is the most important value to strive to live by. As they say in Silicon Valley, all else is hackable.

The ability to live the Golden Rule is something that, like good wine, tends to improve with age. While children begin to develop basic empathetic capacities in their first few years, it is not until the early to mid-twenties that most people develop the full neurological capacity. And some never do.

As you mature through life, you may notice that you become better able to put yourself mentally in the shoes of other people. And you can consciously cultivate this capacity.

If you can walk in the shoes of another and understand what he or she is experiencing, you can find ways to authentically care about the experiences of other people in your life.

The way I understand the Golden Rule most deeply is through the recognition of our interconnectedness, as a human species and as a planetary system of life.

When we realize that everything we do affects others, and that we are inextricably connected to those others—“caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny” as Martin Luther King, Jr., so beautifully put it—we begin to care in a deeper way about the choices we make and the actions we take.  

We start thinking more about everyone else and the greater life-systems we are part of, rather than simply trying to improve our own lives and perhaps those of a few loved ones.

Justin Rosenstein, inventor of the Facebook “like” button and now co-founder of Asana, expressed this succinctly as “the shift from ME to WE” in a powerful talk he gave at the 2013 Wisdom 2.0 conference. I highly recommend watching the video.

Rosenstein talks about “the shift from identifying with our individual minds and bodies to identifying with the needs and interests of humanity as a whole.” He points out that this shift is already underway, but we can accelerate it by, among other things, spreading an understanding of the idea of interconnectedness.

This core value—caring about our impact on others and seeing their interests as being as valid and significant as our own—is the essence of the Golden Rule. I believe that simply embracing this one value would dramatically change the way we do business, the way we steward our environment, the way we think about other nations and cultures and religions.

Fifty values I do my best to follow

In addition to the Golden Rule, I have found fifty values I do my best to live by.

I’ve drawn these from reading the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, some Greek philosophers, Benjamin Franklin’s 13 values (below), and other writers and thinkers I respect, as well as thinking about my life purpose. I’m far from perfect, but I try to follow these values as often as possible:

Main photo: Unsplash/Evan Kirby

*This article was originally published on October 17th, 2018 and updated on December 11th, 2018.