Discover your values
Even though/if you have a strong understanding of your skills and abilities, you might still feel that this isn’t enough to justify what you should pursue. I also thought for a long time that this was enough, but something didn’t feel right, so I kept re checking my skills over and over again.
Obviously this doesn’t work, because I failed the most common thing about something: “when something doesn’t work, don’t try to solve the problem again with the same approach”.
I needed a new framework, but I didn’t know that I did. Luckily I came across Julian Shapiro's personal values exercise which settled it once and for all. I finally found the last puzzle piece.
When figuring out what it makes sense for you to focus on in life you are taking a complete shot in the dark if you don’t include values anywhere in the equation.
Personal values are not necessarily skills or pursuits. They are more like concepts of life. They are what gives meaning to our lives. They are the whole reason you’re doing what you do.
I have several values, but some are more important than others. Some examples from my own life:
Why do I practise the piano? Obviously because the concept of music is interesting to me. But also because it fulfills one of my values: Mastery (being good at a skill). Being good at something gives meaning to my life. Having a skill you’re good at feels like you are worthy of living. It’s empowering and gives me a sense of accomplishment.
Why do I have a strong urge to pursue entrepreneurship? For me, entrepreneurship satisfies several values. Craftsmanship is one of them. One of the coolest things about being a human instead of a chipmunk is that we have the power to create and manipulate the world. Taking this to the furthest extreme, intelligent creatures might one day be able to do awesome things such as creating wormholes or artificial solar systems etc.
Whatever we can imagine might in some way be possible to create. This creative power thrills me more than anything else in the world. Today, creating a business is the best way to execute ideas you have and bring new concepts and creations to the world.
Also, I like entrepreneurship because I value personal autonomy and financial freedom. A successful business can give you passive income that will free up your time so that you can use that time to pursue your other values.
Thinking about it like this justifies why you pursue what you pursue. In my opinion there is no higher meaning to life than pursuing your personal values. This is because you don’t pursue these values in order to achieve anything else beyond them. They have intrinsic value. Living out those values is a definite end goal in themselves.
Being confident that you are working towards your true personal values is one of the most empowering, satisfying and motivating feelings in the world.
First, you need to figure out which values you care about. Then you need to find out what career and projects you want to pursue that best satisfy those values.
Julian Shapiro’s personal values exercise
Here are some very common values that a lot of people live for:
Fame
Money (usually a means to some other end rather than being a value in of itself)
Craftmanship (innovation, creativity)
Connecting with people
Family
Power / status
Mastery (Being good at a skill)
Security (Being comfortable and safe)
Autonomy (Financial freedom to pursue your interests)
Adventure (Seeking experiences)
Pleasure / enjoyment (Finding intrinsic meaning in feeling happy regardless of what situation the happiness comes from. The opinion that happiness and having enjoyable experiences is what life is about)
Generosity / helping others
Personal growth (Growing / learning / spirituality)
Love
I wouldn't be surprised if after some hard thinking you discovered that all the values you care about are in this list. When it comes to personal values, people are more similar than you’d think. People in two different cultures can have very different daily tasks, but they do it in pursuit of the same values.
Let’s say you have a business that provides you with passive income. You might be doing this because you value financial freedom to have time to pursue your interests. For some people, “financial freedom” is another way of saying more time on your hands. Someone in a tribe in a rainforest might also value having time on their hands to do what they want with their time. But instead of having a passive income business, they achieve the equivalent by preserving food in clever ways and stocking up on things they need so that they only have to work 2-4 days a week instead of every day.
So when finding your own personal values, don't try to be different or creative. Just simply follow your heart and be honest to yourself about what you care about. Your uniqueness can shine through in the way you pursue these values - through your career and projects.
To help you nail down your values, I have included a more extensive list below.
Values which are “actionable”:
These values can be achieved directly by pursuing a career or a project.
Fame
Money (usually a means to some other end rather than being a value in of itself)
Craftmanship (innovation, creativity)
Connecting with people
Family
Power / status
Mastery (Being good at a skill)
Security (Being comfortable and safe)
Autonomy (Financial freedom to pursue your interests)
Adventure (Seeking experiences)
Pleasure / enjoyment (Finding intrinsic meaning in feeling happy regardless of what situation the happiness comes from. The opinion that happiness and having enjoyable experiences is what life is about)
Generosity / helping others
Personal growth (Growing / learning / spirituality)
Love
Success
Connection to nature
Preserving nature
Pursuing curiosity
influence / popularity / recognition / respect
“Lifestyle” values
These values are not directly actionable. Instead, they are usually achieved indirectly as a by-product of pursuing the actionable values above.
Accountability
Authenticity
Belonging/community (achieving success in the bubble of a small town is a lot easier than achieving worldwide success)
Creativity / ingenuity
Diversity
Fairness
Discipline
Empathy / compassion
Ethics/morality
Fun
work/life balance
integrity
honesty
ideals
Restraint
spontaneity
Tradition
Health / vitality
Uniqueness/individualism
Determination
Humour
Justice
wisdom
I believe these are the majority of values that it’s possible for any human to deeply care about. As you can see, there are not that many “total” values in the world. This means that these are universal values associated with being human. Which again means that anything you ever do, you do to fulfil a handful of these values in your life.
Don’t pursue outdated projects or values
The goal with this personal value exercise is mainly to help people who have too many interests narrow down and find which of their interests are the ones that make more sense to focus on.
There is another good thing about this exercise. And that’s to identify exactly when you should be working on something.
It’s important to not do this exercise only once in your life. Why? Because your values change over time. Often so slowly that you don’t even notice it.
We often arrive at our values early in life, feel confident about it and then spend the next 20 years pursuing those values without checking in with them to see if they’re still relevant.
I’m going to commit a cliche and partly blame our education system. Our education system is built around the fact that you are supposed to decide what you want to do with your life before you turn 20. But they leave out an incredibly important factor which we have just discovered a few paragraphs back:
What you want to do with your life depends on your values. Whoopsy. You didn’t think about that now did you, Mr education system?
There are a few psychiatrists and lifestyle coaches out there (also called educationalists) who are working hard to help the education system change its habits. But we don’t have to wait for that. While we wait, you can do something about this yourself.
All you have to do is make sure that you do this exercise every three years or so. Because you need to pursue projects that satisfy your present values. You have no idea if your values are going to change or not, so pursuing values that you think you might have in the future doesn’t make sense. It wouldn’t feel meaningful.
It’s even easier to fall into the trap of pursuing outdated values. A lot of people seem to be under the impression that values are something that you keep once you have found them.
We often hear that in order to reach our goals we need to consistently stick to something. I completely agree. Shane Parrish, the creator of one of my go-to websites for wisdom on demand, has a lot to say about this. On his Twitter and Facebook he consistently drops value bombs about how important consistency is when working towards a goal:
“Consistency is the price of excellence.”
"In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency."
They even knew this before you were born:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.”
— John Heywood (c. 1497 – c. 1580)
This is a major truth about success, but on a very important condition - that you are working consistently on something that is currently satisfying one of your personal values. After five years when you realise that becoming famous actually makes very little sense and you’re still choosing to pursue projects to chase this outdated childhood dream because this is the best way of becoming famous and you are so proud of how consistently you’re bashing out this goal, you will become miserable because fame isn’t actually what you want anymore. During those five years, you have learning new things, met new people and gained new experiences. Your values have slowly changed as a result of that. It’s time to think through what your new values are and update your projects accordingly.
This is easier said than done because a lot of people are afraid of realising that they have “wasted” precious time pursuing something they no longer want.
I have done this myself. And I have AGONISED LIKE HELL over the fact that I have wasted so much time pursuing something I no longer care about.
Most of my adolescence was spent gearing myself up to become an actor and musician. After I finished my acting degree at the age of 23 I realised I shouldn't, but I didn’t want to admit it yet. Eventually (and thankfully) I did after a while.
It turned out that having the guts to stop that trajectory and shift tracks onto a trajectory that I care about and aligned with my new, updated values is 10X more fulfilling and empowering than “saving time” pursuing a career path you have spent so much time becoming good at. You will eventually get over it and you will be so happy you changed your career. If you continue pursuing a goal when you want another goal even more either because you feel it would be too bad to waste all those years changing trajectory or because you feel you won’t have enough years left in your life to become good enough at another skill or field you will most likely regret afterwards.
It’s hard to know what to do. What if your old values will come back and the new values you have now are just a temporary curiosity?
It’s impossible to know what values you might get in the future. A good rule of thumb is: Always follow what your values are today.
Why?
Because it’s the best you can do. It’s the best chance you have to be working on something that is meaningful to you
If you work on something which is meaningful to you today, you will be happy, motivated and driven. Choosing something that you think you might find meaningful in the future because you don’t want to spend time choosing something you think might be just a temporary curiosity is the equivalent of taking a shot in the dark.
And since you don’t currently find it meaningful you won’t be at your most motivated and you won't have the energy and drive which is necessary to overcome the obstacles that will inevitably happen.
By choosing projects which align with your current values it means that you are always working on something which is meaningful to you. And that’s something you won’t regret in the future.
This is what caused Jeff Bezoz to step down as CEO of Amazon. His values had changed and he decided to listen to them.
Arnold schwarzenegger stopped pursuing acting and became a politician. And this makes perfect sense if his values changed.
And I will also stop pursuing filmmaking or entrepreneurship whenever they no longer align with my core values. But for now it’s the most meaningful thing to me and it’s what makes most sense to pursue, so I’ll continue to pursue them.
When working out what your values are, listen to your heart instead of your mind. Don’t try to force values on yourself because they would be smart choices. But then you’re running the risk of making the wrong choice. Your heart doesn’t act like that.
Your heart acts from instinct and emotions while your brain makes choices based on thinking rationally and analysing the situation. Unfortunately, you have to deal with all their moaning and find a way to satisfy them both.
It’s not always that one or two frameworks do the trick for you. Even after doing all these exercises you might still be searching for the answer. Maybe you need to view this problem from a whole new angle. There is one angle in particular that is really powerful.
Not long ago I was going through some youtube videos in search of something. When it struck me that I was just mindlessly clicking through videos because I had forgotten what I was searching for, I found a treasure. It was a video of Jeff Bezoz explaining a concept he called Regret Minimization.
Regret Minimization
Here is how the Regret Minimization framework works: Imagine yourself as an 80 year old thinking back on your life and asking yourself what you most regret not having done. That gives you a strong clue about what you should definitely make sure you do today. This framework is all about making sure you do the things today that will minimize regret later in life.
This works particularly well in the scenarios where you have to make a choice between 2 careers or skills that you think you love equally. Imagine yourself as an 80-year-old in both scenarios. While you’re deep inside the headspace of your future 80-year-old self, which of your present-day goals would make you the most sad, bitter and regretful 80-year-old person if you didn’t accomplish that goal?
That’s probably the goal you should pursue today, and you can safely leave your other goals.
If you have a strong imagination, you can almost physically feel some of this pain, and that’s when this exercise becomes powerful.
You are probably asking yourself: “Surely my values and interests will change by the time I’m 80?” They probably will - even multiple times for most people. But it's impossible to use any techniques now to figure out what mindset you will have as an 80-year-old. Not only will you change as a person. You will also be affected by the world around you. And since it’s pretty much impossible to predict what the world will look like by the time you're 80, figuring out your mindset as an 80-year-old won't lead to anything conducive.
But this exercise actually gives you an insight into what you want to do now. You're taking a completely different perspective to the problem and it casts a light on your true present interests. This is because you are making the brain think with the same youthful mind as you have now.
Putting it all together
Figuring out what to pursue in life can be one of the most difficult and time-consuming questions to answer. That’s partly why this guide is a bit long.
No one tool or “hack” is enough to land on a confident decision. It’s all the tools together that will get you the best answer. But remember that this is an ongoing process. One of the reasons why so many people hate their life is that they think they made their decision when they were 20 years old and they don’t have to make it again. An honest and fulfilling life is reserved for those who are insightful enough to understand that their life is going in the wrong direction and brave enough to dare to change trajectory even though they have built up massive momentum in another direction.
Most people actively try to ignore the fact that they might be pursuing the wrong thing. They can’t face the thought that they might have to spend years learning something new to change their career to entertain their new interest. They would rather suppress their new interest or values and instead cling on to the pride they get from having managed to stick to the same interest their whole life.
But what I have realised is that knowing the truth is much more comfortable than constantly having to come up with excuses to hide the truth.