If your deepest beliefs drive your writing, they will not only keep your work from being contrived but will help you discover what drives your characters. You may find some really good people beneath the packaging and posing—people whom we, your readers, will like, whose company we will rejoice in. We like certain characters because they are good or decent—they internalize some decency in the world that makes them able to take a risk or make a sacrifice for someone else. They let us see that there is in fact some sort of moral compass still at work here, and that we, too, could travel by this compass if we so choose.

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.

A New Lens on Leadership*

There is a great irony for me as I finish this project: I learned more about effective leadership in doing this study than in all my decades of studying what makes great organizations tick. That’s an irony because many people who know my prior work would categorize me as a “leadership expert” based on five books wherein I’d studied and written about some of the greatest corporate leaders of all time. Yet it took this project to finally see perhaps the most important ingredient in effective leadership: leading from your encodings.

A friend once said of my earlier work that I wrote with a signature of “well-founded hope.” The mountains of systematic research, combined with my dedication to drawing insights from the evidence, provided the “well-founded” part. “But the message is always hopeful,” he said. “You demonstrate with evidence that good can become great, that people can build organizations worthy of lasting, that strong values can win in a hypercompetitive world.” Well-founded hope. This study only added to that signature for me. It made me feel even more hopeful and optimistic, not directly about the world at large, but about people. And people, after all, make the world.

Bill Meehan, intellectual provocateur and caring friend, encouraged and challenged me to widen and deepen the scope of what this book is all about. “Don’t waste your time— or your words— on the little questions,” he’d hammer at me. “Go for the big questions, the questions of truth and wisdom and meaning. You need to be more of a poet and less of an analyst, more of a philosopher and less of a strategist” I’ve always built my books on a foundation of rigorous research and empirical evidence, and What to Make of a Life is no exception.