“For twenty years, what needed doing came first. For the next two, I’d like to decide what comes first.”
Your life has been telling you what matters for years: in a moment you were proud of, a frustration that keeps coming back, something you wish you’d given more time, an interest you keep returning to.
The Four Signals Guide gives you about twenty quiet minutes to read those moments, name one value they point to in your own words, and hold it up against a decision you’re considering.
Get the Four Signals Guide
The values that built this chapter were right for it.
They built the career and the family, and they kept the promises that came with both. Left alone, they go on deciding for you, long after the chapter they were built for.
The next chapter may ask for different ones to lead. Before you build toward it, it’s worth knowing which values should have the say.
Four kinds of moments. One at a time, each is easy to dismiss. Read together, they’re hard to ignore.
A moment you felt proud or quietly satisfied with something you did.
It points to a value you’re already living.
Something that keeps coming back and bothers you, beyond a single hard day.
It marks something important that isn’t getting its due.
Something you wish you’d given more time or attention.
It isn’t there to pull you backward. It shows what deserves a place in your life now.
An interest or way of living you keep coming back to.
What you keep paying attention to usually changes before your life does.
Take one man’s moments: proud of time with his children, frustrated when work cuts into it, pulled toward more of it. Three signals, one value. For him, it’s connection. Your own moments will point to your own.
The guide doesn’t plan the next chapter for you. It helps you name one value that deserves to lead it, in your own words, and hold it up against one real decision.
One night in Venice, late, in a small pizza restaurant, I watched my daughter across the table. She was seventeen: confident, independent, completely at ease in a foreign country. I felt proud, and grateful I hadn’t postponed that trip. Not someday. Now.
It took me years longer to hear the rest. The life I wanted wasn’t hiding from me. It had been speaking to me for years. I’d been too busy to hear it.
A short exercise you can come back to.
Not a personality test, not another values list, and no score. Your own moments, read closely.
Set aside about twenty quiet minutes. Type into the guide, or print it and write by hand.
Take what you notice into your decisions.
A real decision usually touches more than one thing that matters: health and work, family and freedom, what you’ve built and what you’d like to try. Authority Foundations is where you choose the core values that get the final say over your next two years, and start making decisions by them.
Through three videos and a workbook you complete at your own pace, you choose the five core values you want to lead your decisions and use them to weigh a decision you’re facing. The guide names one value. Foundations puts five to work.
The guide stands on its own. Foundations is optional, and you can begin it without finishing the guide first.
I created The Four Signals Guide because moments from my own life told me more about what mattered than a list of values ever could.
For years, I kept coming back to the idea of living abroad. That pull took me to Thailand, then to Spanish school in Medellín at 52, and to the life I have now. It took me time to see what it was pointing at.
The evidence usually arrives long before we choose to read it. These questions are how I read mine now. What you do with what they show you is yours to decide.