Morning Walk #8
Why do you need to formulate your personal core values
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In this issue
My personal core values and why do you need to discover yours
Some interesting things I read/watched/listened to lately
My personal core values and why do you need to discover yours
Marketers and business strategists came up with the concept of brand values long ago. You are probably familiar with quite a handful number of them. Apple values privacy (among other things), Nike has a strong opinion on equality.
In addition to that, there are company values. These are more about the company's internal work culture and aimed at making their HR brand more appealing to their current and prospective employees. My favorite example here is Buffer which is unimaginable without being default to transparency, but there are plenty more.
I used to have a strong opinion about company values. I thought that they were corporate bullshit. They are most of the time. Not just because employees don't live by those values but because they are often quite vague, lengthy, and there are just too many of them. If your company has 7-8 values, I bet most of your staff can't recall half of them right away.
But I was lucky enough to work in a team with straightforward company values, which changed my mind. Company values can do wonders and be genuinely helpful in making big decisions and supporting your everyday choices.
In case you were wondering what our company values were:
mastery (it’s about always making your best effort and producing world-class products).
consciousness (always be mindful about the task at hand and why you are doing what you’re doing).
cooperation (help others and be helpful to others).
But the other concept I haven't thought about is formulating your own personal core values. It seemed silly at first. Why do I need to write them down? I won't be communicating them to people I work with or to my friends. I know what I stand for. I always have that in my mind. But putting them on paper or simply stating them once can have a tremendous effect on your future choices. Especially if you're coming back to them frequently enough.
My wife has formulated her values once, and I've witnessed firsthand what kind of an impact these can make.
Last year I decided that I wanted to formulate my own. I wanted something that would become the backbone of all my decisions and reflect my personality and life goals.
To do this, I turned to my wife for help. She was getting her coaching certificate and knew a lot of handy frameworks that could help me compose these.
After about two hours of thoroughly answering her challenging questions, reflecting a lot and removing many excellent options, we nailed the values I'm pretty happy with. Here they are:
1. Courage (In Russian – смелость)
The worst choices in my life I made out of fear. I want to remind this myself constantly and lose it for good. It's about having the courage to follow my intuition, having the courage not to follow common wisdom, having the courage not to be liked, having the courage to be myself.
How I use it: I constantly ask myself: Is this a courageous choice, or do I make it out of fear? And if the answer to the latter is yes, I need to change something.
2. Grit (стойкость)
This one is about having the resilience to play long-term. There will be a lot of downsides and challenges along the way, and I'm prepared for it all.
How I use it: when I'm faced with a difficult challenge, I remind myself of the long-term game I'm playing and that I need to be strong to keep going. Nothing great is ever easy.
3. Purpose (смысл)
This one is about being mindful of what you do and what game you are playing. I don't want to waste my precious time making things that won't have any meaning in the next 10-20-30 years. There is just no point. Of course, some small actions might have significance on a bigger scale, and I'm taking this into account. But I want all my actions to have a purpose and a clear goal I genuinely believe in.
How I use it: When I'm faced with a decision to take some action, I ask myself: "What long-term purpose does that have, and do I relate to it?".
It's been 1.5 years since I did this exercise, and I still feel connected to all of these and coming back to them almost every day. It's been one of the best things I did for my self-discovery in the last few years.
If you want to discover and formulate your own core values, I suggest you get one or two hours with a certified coach who can guide you along the way and pick the best framework tailored for your needs. You can easily do it on your own (this and this frameworks are close to what my wife used), but it's much more efficient to talk them out with the other person.
Things I've been reading/watching/enjoying
Your work and its meaning
Speaking of meaning, this great article provides three strategies to align your career with your pursuit of meaning.
Music is having its web3 moment
I'm super curious about exploring NFTs potential, and now this technology has started to spread into a new market – music.
The Model of Everything
Okay. Not a web3 link. Not Boring explains some exceptional thinking (and execution!) behind ScienceIO, the company that plans to structure all healthcare data in the world 🤯 They already have built the world's largest and highest quality dataset for training healthcare AI with over 2.2 billion labels. This includes clinical trial records, physicians notes, clinical research papers, and many many more.
Better data will lead to better health for millions of people. But still, no one has ever pulled it off because it's so damn hard. And these guys are pretty close to cracking it.
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Thanks for reading. Until next week 👋🏻