VALLEY VALUES
what we stand for
My grandfather had a lump on his head for decades. Logging accident, I think. A golf-ball-sized lump. One morning in his eighties it just popped, oozed out on his pillow. His response: “Oh, I guess the bump is gone now.” My grandmother seemed pleased. That was the entire conversation. Seventy years of marriage, and a quiet understanding that things will go on.
Harold Prouty was a veteran. Logger. Truck driver. Foreman of the Town of Bennington Highway Department for twenty-six years. He never talked about any of it. He never complained about an annoying neighbor. You felt his support just by being in the room with him. He plowed every road in town and nobody thought about why the roads worked. That was the point. He followed his grandchildren’s baseball games. Served his country and community for decades without asking for a thing in return. He ended up running out of room on his wall for plaques.
I’ve spent my whole life – most of it unknowingly – trying to understand what made him that way. The quiet. The follow-through. The total absence of ego about any of it. I think it comes down to four things. Four values that form a loop. It either turns or it doesn’t.
At The Valley, that loop is the operating system: give people room, expect them to use it, help them build, and keep ego out of the way.
FREEDOM
everyone gets theirs
Freedom is the floor. Not the goal – the starting condition.
Every person gets their space. The chill surfer who isn’t building anything. The neighbor who makes choices you’d never make. The guy who annoys the hell out of you. They all get to exist. Their lives are theirs.
Muhammad Ali refused the draft, lost his title, lost years of his career, and faced prison – because he believed it was wrong. A lot of people disagreed with him then and still do. But freedom isn’t only for the choices you approve of. It’s for all of them.
It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It’s the immigrant who opens a bodega on the corner and nobody questions their right to be there. It’s the kid who drops out of college to start a business and his parents let him fail on his own terms.
You don’t get to manage other people’s lives. The asshole gets to be an asshole. He just doesn’t get to shrink someone else’s freedom. That’s the line.
Letting people have their freedom is hard. It’s hard on the left, where the impulse to police who gets to say what has quietly become its own form of control. It’s hard on the right, where the loudest voices for freedom seem mostly interested in their own.
And it’s hardest at the local level, where controlling someone else’s freedom can mask as preservation – protecting the character of a place, keeping things the way they’ve always been. But if “preservation” means a young family can’t build a home or a new business can’t open its doors, that’s not preserving anything. That’s just hoarding space.
Real freedom is the willingness to let other people be.
OWNERSHIP
use yours
Things happen. To all of us. Some people keep choosing. Some people stop. Ownership is the decision to keep choosing and being intellectually honest about the outcome.
Steve Jobs got fired from the company he built. He could have stopped. Instead he chose NeXT, chose Pixar, came back, and built the most valuable company on earth. But he also killed products ruthlessly when they weren’t working.
Teddy Roosevelt lost his wife and his mother on the same day. He went to the Dakotas and ranched. Then he came back and chose public life again. Every chapter of his life was a response to something breaking – and a decision to keep going anyway.
It doesn’t have to be famous. I’ve sat across from first-time founders who ran out of money and had every reason to quit. The ones who owned it didn’t blame the market or the investors. They looked at what happened, were honest about it, and pivoted. I’ve watched a parent show up to a school board meeting – not to complain on Facebook, but to do the homework on the budget and say something uncomfortable out loud in a room full of neighbors.
If you step up to lead, you own the outcomes. All of them.
EMPOWERMENT
expand others’
The point of doing the work isn’t to hold it. It’s to give it away.
Most people who get good at something start hoarding it. Protecting the lane. Making it harder for the next person in. The ones who don’t – the ones who actually build something lasting – figure out that the work compounds when you give it away.
Think about the difference between a billionaire who concentrates – buying companies, consolidating platforms, accumulating influence, convinced that owning everything is the same as solving everything – and Warren Buffett, who would be wealthier than all of them if he hadn’t spent decades giving it away. Quietly. From Omaha. While still being one of the most ruthless capitalists who ever lived.
MacKenzie Scott has given away tens of billions of dollars with almost no strings attached. No naming rights. No grant applications. She finds organizations doing the work, funds them, and gets out of the way. Most people couldn’t even tell you what she looks like.
It’s the coach who builds players that outgrow the team – the one whose kids go on to play somewhere else and still call him ten years later. It’s the Main Street business owner who walks a new owner through their first lease negotiation because they remember how hard it was, instead of gatekeeping the chamber of commerce. Empowerment is everywhere if you’re looking for it. It’s just quieter than concentration.
Concentrated power is louder. Empowerment lasts longer.
HUMILITY
let go
Humility isn’t meekness. It isn’t self-doubt. It isn’t shrinking. It’s the toughest expression of strength there is.
After the Allies crushed World War II, George Marshall had every reason to keep his boot on the throat of the defeated. Instead he helped designed a plan to rebuild them – to give former enemies the space and resources to come back as allies. You just won the biggest war in human history, and your next move is to help the people you beat get back on their feet. Not because you’re soft. Because strength without generosity creates resentment, not peace.
Charlie Munger was just as smart as Warren Buffett. Just as sharp. Just as responsible for building Berkshire Hathaway into what it became. And you heard about him less – by design. He didn’t need the magazine covers. He sat next to his best friend for sixty years, made billions, reshaped how an entire generation thinks about investing, and was perfectly content to let Buffett be the name people knew. That’s not being overlooked. That’s a choice.
Compare that to the guys who can’t stop posting about how hard they work, how much they’ve sacrificed, how nobody appreciates them. The alpha podcast crowd selling toughness to guys who feel small. That’s a guy who can’t sit quietly with what he’s done – or more likely, hasn’t done enough to sit quietly about.
Real humility is quieter. It’s the volunteer who organizes the whole community event and then stands in the back while someone else gives the speech. It’s the neighbor who plows your driveway at 5 AM and never mentions it. You don’t hear about these people because that’s the whole point.
There’s a kind of manliness that’s been squeezed out from both sides. On one end, people got afraid to be direct and strong. On the other, the reaction – performative toughness, podcast alpha energy – is equally fake. Just conformity to a different audience. Real strength doesn’t need either one. Munger never needed either one.
Real strength knows when to lead, and when to get out of the way.
COURAGE
expands what is possible
At the center of all of it – courage. Not a fifth value. The heartbeat.
Courage expands them. Without courage, freedom is just preference. Ownership is a hobby. Empowerment stops at the easy part. Humility is avoidance.
The question courage asks of every value is the same: do you still hold this when everything is going to shit?
—
I lost my mom to cancer the spring of my senior year of high school. Lost my dad unexpectedly in January 2020. My dad made guitars when he was younger – ended up as the CTO of a data processing firm. Two completely different lives inside one man. In a different world where those losses don’t happen, I’m probably not galvanized into the person I am.
But I took ownership over my response to those things. I might not have become a leader if they didn’t happen. There needs to be space for both versions of me – the one who got hit and built, and the one who might have been a ski bum instead.
My dad was a guitar maker and a CTO. Harold was a logger and a foreman. I’m an entrepreneur and a washed-up skier. People contain more than one thing when you give them the room.
I’m naming these values because I’m not my grandfather yet. Still learning to let go. But I know what I’m aiming at – because most of us grew up around someone who lived it. A quiet person who did the work, gave it away, and never talked about it.
You know who yours is.
– Andrew