Looking back, it’s clear that, for many of my teenage choices, what mattered most was not the fun I had at the time—whether buildering was a thrill (it was) or whether studying medicine at Edinburgh involved better parties. Rather, what mattered most was the impact of these choices on the rest of my life, whether I was risking death or altering the values that would guide my future self.

Choosing Responsibilities: This means making deep commitments to freely chosen responsibilities. These responsibilities might be visible and public, or they might be personal and private.

As I worked on this book, I puzzled where core values fit into the research findings. To be clear, there is no single unified set of core values across all the people in this study. That said, each person developed a set of values somewhere along the way, some more explicitly than others. These values might have come from family, or mentors, or teachers, or military service, or the ethics of their field, or the social milieu in which they lived, or their faith traditions, or reading and reflection, or personal experience, or some combination. I came to see that living to a set of core values is a choice, a personal responsibility of the highest order.

The key idea here— whether public or private, whether in line with what other people think you should do or not— is the combination of two words: “choosing” and “responsibilities.” My enduring great friend Tom Tierney puts it this way, “What are you doing that meets the ‘but for’ test? What are you getting done that would not otherwise happen ‘but for you’ even if almost no one ever knows about it?”

You and I don’t need to try to be exactly like any of the people in this study. The relevant question, as it pertains to this chapter, is not whom do we want to emulate, but what responsibilities do we feel compelled to choose? All of us, no matter what we do in life, and no matter how the roulette wheel spins, can choose responsibilities beyond ourselves. It doesn’t matter how many people you touch with the responsibilities you choose; it might be many, or it might be only one or a few. What matters is the very act of honoring a self-chosen responsibility.