Personal values are aspects of life we consider most important to us. Personal values are our guidance systems in life, they are what we base on to make both short-term daily decisions and long-term life choices.
People acquire personal values straight from childhood from their immediate environment; From parents and guardians, most of the values were conditioned; If you sneaked into the cabinet and leaked sugar, you got punished, therefore you learn the value that theft is bad. If you listened to your parent and did your homework on time, you got rewarded therefore, obedience is good.
Some values were picked up from interactions with friends; sharing your toys with friends got you approval, therefore sharing is good. Even as you grow older, you still pick up values from your regular interactions with friends. Parents and guardians however are replaced with people of authority: teachers, bosses, police.
The values you gather affect most aspects of your life; They dictate your goals and interests, they are what you use to measure your self-worth, they are what you use to define success and happiness. At the core, they define who you are and what you want in life.
Definition of success
Success means different things to different people; for some it’s a six-figure salary, for others it’s raising a family, for some it’s exploring their full potential and leaving a legacy of their own, for others it’s being of service to other people.
Setting goals and striving for success isn’t nearly as important as defining what success is to you. It’s because, without clearly defining what success means to you, you risk pursuing goals you don’t genuinely care about. That’s where values come in, they help you define what success means to you on a personal basis.
If external validation is what you value, your goal would be to impress as many people as you can, success is the amount of attention and validation you attract. If impacting people’s lives is what you value, the goal would be to find a way to add value to people’s lives, success is measured by how much value you bring people.
It is imperative that you clearly define what success is to you and align it with your own personal values otherwise you either end up wearing yourself out chasing goals you don’t authentically value, or try and keep up with someone running a different race.
The brighter side of this is that prioritization helps us rediscover who you really are and what you really want. Most of the things we think we want are as a result of our insecurities or fear of missing out(FOMO). Prioritization helps you zero in on the things you value the most. Acknowledging the fact that you can’t have it all relieves you from the burden of always trying to be it all. It also gives you a better appreciation for the little you have and what you are.
Prioritization
Your definition of success helps you prioritize to the things that mean the most to you, someone else would call it, ‘the why for living’. However, most people rarely have a single goal or single reason for living; you could want to make an impact on people’s lives, but also make money and also raise a family. However, being human means we all have a finite amount of energy and a limited amount of time each day, most times priorities need to be set straight, hence goals ranked in order of priorities.
Much as we all envision a life in which every aspect of our life is straightened out, that’s rarely the case. That perfect life where you’re earning a seven figure salary from a dream job, while pursuing creative endeavors from the side, perfect health, wealth, whole family.
Life rarely plays out this way, perfection is impossible, we can always strive towards it but can never achieve it. Building a career might take most of your time leaving you with none for pursuing creative endeavors, if you choose to do both, you may have to sacrifice either family time, or end up sleeping three hours a day and sacrifice physical health.
Often times, life calls for us to prioritize what we value most, which may call for sacrifice of another. Values help you realize what means the most to you. Fail to prioritize and you might end up losing both.
Say for example a father working a decent job with a comfortable monthly pay-check gets another job offer. That would mean a significantly bigger pay-check but an 80-hour work week hence less family time. That’s when priorities come in, more money or more family time. But even that is overly simplistic, more money could mean providing better quality of life for the family: which might turn into weighing between provision for material needs vs emotional and psychological needs by ones presence. The value judgements go on and on.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow but; we can’t always have it all. If you try to, you may end up losing both, you become less efficient at your job while trying to maintain the same amount of family time hence lose it, then come back to a family that was damaged by your absence.
However, this doesn’t mean that choose say for example your career and go all in and leave the other aspects of life, no, often times a healthy life constitutes a healthy balance of all the above aspects. What it means is that you can work an accounting job by day, pursue your musical hobbies by night, and also go to the gym, but you can’t be a top accountant, who’s a five-star musician, and also a professional athlete, there’s just not enough time in a day to pursue everything at the same time (Well a few can, but those are outliers). Often times it’s one craft at a time, the rest hobbies.
Passion vs Career
When it comes down to making life choices especially career, it rarely boils down to either choosing money vs passion, usually there is a lot more factors at play. Life isn’t always as easy as following one’s passion, parents retire or sometimes die and you have to become self-reliant fast. Sometimes raising a sickly kid requires shouldering a 9-5 job that provides health insurance, sometimes taking a job instead of a passion is worth seeing a parent retire from doing two jobs just to support you. It all ties back to what you value the most.
Hobbies and Interests
Setting your values straight helps you better define who you are and what you want. In today’s world of social pressures and expectations, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of adopting what everyone else is doing to make themselves happy thinking it will also make you happy. Talk about happiness and things that pop into most people’s heads is party, travelling or going to the beach.
Most people go along with such definitions without asking themselves what they value on a deeper level. Some people value intimate conversations and would trade crazy night at a club, for hanging out with one or a handful of friends. Some people value family and would choose a day indoors with family over a solo trip to Hawaii. Some people value their craft and would prefer an afternoon working on it rather than going to the beach.
The problem comes in when people start feeling left out because they’re not fitting in the brackets of ‘what everybody else is doing’, like; thinking you’re a loner or boring and unadventurous. Perhaps your values and different and so are your interests.
Self-worth and Comparison
People judge their own worth as well as the worth of others using the same scales. Those scales depend on one’s values; you feel a higher sense of worth if you score highly on such values and vice versa. For example; a girl who values physical beauty likely measures her own worth by how physically beautiful she measures and that’s also how she measures the worth of others. It’s also on that basis that she compares herself with other people.
A man who values wealth will compare himself with other men based on how much they earn, or the model of their Mercedes. A problem at times arises where someone measures their worth by other people’s scales and not their personal values. This is the person who breaks themselves making money and seeking fame but when they get it, they realize that they don’t feel as fulfilled as they thought they would. They might even feel emptier than before. Why? Because they measured their worth by values that were not their own.
Final thoughts
Chances are that you already have values by which you live. Every time you choose one thing over another, you make a value judgement. The difference is that some people are conscious when picking values, others are subconsciously controlled by their own. The key is to become self-aware of your values, drop bad ones, adopt better ones, then align your choices and actions with them.
Thank you for this well written article. The ideas are coherent and the arguments concrete. I agree with most of them. I think the distinction between passion and career is not set in stone. One can find ways of combining their passion and career. For example a doctor who likes music may sing for patients. This broadens the possible permutations of what people could be. It is unique and fascinating.
Very true. Actually being flexible and trying out different passions is healthy. However you can’t be Jayz and a successful neural surgeon at the same time.
A very good piece, well thought-out and very well written. Thank you very much for these very enlightening insights, Mr Oloya.
You’re most welcome.