1. Virtue: Enjoy making the world a better place, in every possible way, no matter how small, as best you can.
2. Identity: Remember that you are the part of the world that you most control.
3. Purpose: Have well thought out goals, plans, and strategies for doing the most good in your life.
4. Self Discipline: Make sure you do what you think is best, every single time. Listen to your mentors for guidance.
5. Self Confidence: Aim high. Partially achieving a great goal is often better than completely achieving a mediocre goal.
6. Audacity: Find out what happens when you always try your absolute best. You might surprise yourself.
7. Positivity: Focus on the task at hand. Visualize it, then do it. Think positively, just short of unjustifiably optimistic.
8. Diligence: Work hard on things in order of their importance, and skip the things that don't really matter.
9. Abstinence: Don't waste your time. Define yourself in part by the things you do not do.
10. Learning: Always be learning. Develop the knowledge, skills, and experience you need. Ask questions. Stay curious.
11. Values: Integrity, honesty, open-mindedness, reliability, generosity, compassion, courage, creativity, mentorship.
12. Health: Practice lifetime habits of optimal diet, exercise, rest, and recreation for vitality and longevity.
13. Intellect: Use precise reason and logic as the guiding force in your life. Practice your ability to think clearly.
14. Emotions: Manage your emotions for the greater good. Natural selection gave us emotions to help us, not hurt us.
15. Think: Think before you act. While theoretically one could think too much, this is rarely a problem with humans.
16. Universality: Behave and follow principles that, if everyone did, the world would be a better place.
17. Vigilance: Beware of false notions of virtue that, if everyone followed them, would make the world a worse place.
18. Strength: Stand up for right over wrong. Invest the time and energy to know the difference. Beware of simpletons.
19. Character: Do what is right, even when it is not fashionable, easy, or beneficial to you.
20. Cooperation: Seek out others to help them make the world a better place, and accept their help in your life too.
21. Reciprocity: Say please and thank you, return favors, pay your debts, and keep your promises. Find win-win situations.
22. Kindness: Do random acts of kindness, volunteer for good causes, and make yourself a valuable asset to others.
23. Understanding: Learn from other people's experiences, successes, and failures. Copy the good and beware of the bad.
24. Regulation: Support proven rules that enhance the greater good, but beware arbitrary bureaucratic control.
    
25. Respect: Treat everyone, including yourself, with respect, kindness, and generosity, without empowering bad behavior.
26. Fairness: Have uniformly high standards of excellence that challenge and inspire everyone to do their best. 
27. Inclusiveness: Help all good people, including those outside your usual circles, make their unique contribution to the world.
28. Diversity: Appreciate everyone's gifts to the world, including those who have different backgrounds and ideas.
29. Skepticism: Beware of ideologies lacking an impressive record of success, no matter how great they sound in theory.
30. Generations: Pass your knowledge, wisdom, and experience to the younger generations.

The above mission statement is what I teach my 4 sons and 2 daughters. It is genuinely what I think is good advice for living a great life but, regrettably, I do not know everything. Use at your own risk.

I inherited most of the above values from my parents and grandparents. I think they would say that everything on the above list is obvious. Nevertheless, carefully listing your core principles has value: First, we can discuss the merits of each principle to make sure they are correct. Second, we can be more deliberate about living up to our ideals.

A harder exercise is creating a framework for being a good parent. Since I have 6 kids, I've thought a lot about this. Of course, every parent thinks they are an expert. In some ways, this is true since every family is unique. All we can do is examine the evidence of what has worked well in other families, and then try to do our best. In this modest spirit, fully recognizing that there are many different ways to be great parents, here is what has worked well for my family, at least from a dad's perspective: 

1. Importance: If you have kids, enjoy making your kids possibly your greatest contribution to the world.
2. Marriage: Choose a spouse who also wants to enjoy making their kids possibly their greatest contribution to the world.
3. Team Work: Choose a spouse whose strengths cover for your weaknesses so that both of you can play to your strengths.
   
4. Pets: Raising kids is even harder than kittens and puppies. Consider practicing on a kid safe breed of dog first.
5. Play: Spend time and have fun with your kids in ways that help them grow and learn from their mistakes.
6. Growth: Teach your kids the Enjoy/Practice/Succeed cycle for getting good at things, and then celebrate their successes.
   
7. Self-Value: Treat your kids with dignity, respect, and appreciation. Teach them to value and love themselves.
8. Education: Teach your kids everything you know, whether they want to hear it or not, and how to learn more generally.
9. Expectations: Have age appropriate high expectations for your kids, and show them how to achieve them.
10. Goals: Outline paths for a successful life for your kids. Don’t assume they’ll figure it out.
11. Responsibility: Take responsibility for your part in the people your kids become. Teach them to thank you later.
12. Discipline: Make sure your kids do what you think is best, every single time. Discipline leads to self-discipline and success.
13. Love: Do what is best for your kids, not what makes you most popular with them in the short run. Like hugging them.
14. Patience: Take the time to explain the world and your decisions to your kids. They’ll need this later.
15. Guardianship: Be able to explain to the adult version of your child why your decisions were best for them.
16. Restraint: Never hurt a child, physically or emotionally. They’re fragile. Be firm, but also understanding.
17. Authority: Insist on obedience and respect. Your judgment, while not perfect, is better than theirs.
18. Consequences: Figure out which positive and negative consequences work best for each kid.
19. Consistency: Mostly reward good behavior, but also punish bad behavior, every single time.
20. Watchfulness: If you or anyone else is rewarding bad behavior or punishing good behavior for any reason, make it stop.
21. Human Nature: Expect kids to repeat behavior, good or bad, that gets them what they think they want.
22. Force of Will: No excuses. Parents are responsible for their kids. Be in charge.
23. Mentorship: Set a good example, but also teach kids to be better than you.
24. Honesty: Admit your faults to your kids, openly and honestly. Raise them to have your virtues but not your faults.
25. Choices: Give your younger kids multiple choice decisions where all the choices are good.
26. Conscience: As your older kids make more decisions, make sure they know what you think is right.
27. Values: Hold family meetings with everyone in attendance where you discuss right and wrong and other important issues.
    
28. Independence: When your kids make good decisions, grant them more independence. Bad decisions, less.
29. Adulthood: As your kids become adults, become a trusted advisor who is always there for them.
30. Virtue: Teach your kids to enjoy making the world a better place, in every possible way, no matter how small, as best they can.