I would say I have two ideas that guide my decision-making and the way I deal with people. I guess that counts. One is: I have nothing to hide and no one to answer to, and I keep it that way. The other is: Time is more important to money.
This may explain why I don’t have much money and don’t care who knows it. 
I’m, like, really into pasta. And garlic.
Life is a process, a series of propositions. One of the things I’ve realized is that we are compelled to live in a certain manner, in an alignment with an ethos as you put it, because they are the struggles we deal with on a larger part. At some point, they stop being a conscious driving point and just become the essence of who we are, and we move on to the next journey. Looking back over my life, I’ve always known when I’ve progressed because I’ve been able to encapsulate the whole journey into a simple saying or motto. At one point, it was a struggle to define the difference between what is good and what is right and that led immediately into the next of defining trust and the ethics of freedom, which has inevitably led to where I am now, though I am on the verge of moving to the next one, we’ll see how that goes when it comes.
So, for as I am now, it’s best summaraized as “Keep your eyes on the horizon.” We can best orient ourselves using the horizon, and we set our eyes off on the distance we can just keep going. If we look up, we may have some grand guidance by the stars, but we moreso have our heads in the clouds and we can easily trip over even the smallest object before our feet that we don’t see. Inversely, if we look down at our feet, we may never trip, but we have no grand aim, we can easily get lost wandering in circles, directionless, lost in the mundane details. But at the horizon, we have a perfect balance between it all. We can still have the stars to guide us, but we can also still navigate the mundane details of our daily lives to get as far as we can. Goals should be seen, at most, as milestones, but we should never stray off-course.
Interestly, this leads to me doing and believing a lot of things that don’t make sense to most people, other than in the context that it is how I live my life. But I can also honestly say that, other than some brief moments, I’m as happy now in general as I’ve ever been, substantially moreso than when I followed some of the more traditional ethos. In fact, it was following those that led to my collapse and reassessment into where I am now. To each his own path, I suppose.