Values: The Ultimate Shield Against Shiny-Object Syndrome

"We use values to assist with decision making when you have imperfect information” – Mark Willson

Sometimes the universe speaks to you very quietly. Sometimes the universe screams in your ear until you are forced to sit up and pay attention. I’ve been asking everybody I come across who has shown any interest in the blog what they might be interested in having covered. But then, in the last month, I’ve had eight conversations that, each in their way, came back to the necessity of values to facilitate decision-making and goal attainment, both on the personal and professional sides.

Surprisingly enough, the personal and professional applications of values are not all that different. They are two sides of the same coin; however they do play out slightly differently.

Let’s start on the personal side because I think it’s easier to grasp. Five months into my relationship with my now-husband, we took our first trip together. As any cool couple in the initial sparks of their relationship does, I decided we should do an exercise on determining our values as individuals and as a couple. So here we were, sitting in the airport, going through an exercise that is credited to the great mind of Warren Buffett (though potentially debunked as originating with him. Either way, it’s a great exercise).

The first step is to write down—and writing is a critically important part of it, because it prevents you from taking accidental shortcuts in your mind — 25 things, values, or achievements you want to have or have had by the time you die. It can be absolutely anything you want to be able to look back on as having achieved. It could be raising a family, learning to play the guitar, collecting 30 cool stamps, or anything in between. Go ahead and write down 25. I will pause here and wait for you.

Writing 1 to 15 is super easy. Writing 15 to 20 starts to get a little bit harder. Writing 20 to 25 was genuinely hard for me. I started throwing things in there like re-learning to play the saxophone. Would it actually make me happy? Probably not. But at the same time, it wouldn’t make me unhappy.

Now that you’ve stretched and come up with 25 things that would make you genuinely happy at the end of your life to have achieved, cut that down to 5. Going from 25 to 15 is super easy; saxophone was a stretch to add in the first place, so it’s easy to get rid of it. 15 to 10 is usually still relatively easy; you’re starting to lose some of the aspects that you think you probably would have enjoyed, but they’re nice to haves, not need to haves. Going from 10 to 7 starts to get a little more difficult. 7 to 6 is hard. 6 to 5 is really, really difficult. Take the time to do this properly. Sit with your thoughts and be honest with yourself. Would you rather travel, or would you rather live in a nice home? Would you rather become a CEO, or would you rather play the guitar, because your entire family has played the guitar for generations, and learning it is meaningful to you?

When you have those five values, they create a lens through which everything else can be decided. You are no longer addressing every single question from scratch, which is both draining and difficult. There are countless decisions in life, both large and small, and if every single one of them is addressed in the moment, it opens the door for shiny objects, exhaustion, or even hunger to have a larger impact on any individual decision-making process. That risks pulling you astray from the things that genuinely make you happy. This is especially important for the big decisions, turning decisions that could cause analysis paralysis into easy picks. Addressing the endless decisions that arise in life becomes more manageable when you filter them through your values first.

For example, we were looking to travel for several weeks. We had 80% of the trip planned, and suddenly, an undeveloped parcel of land became available. We couldn’t afford to do both, and yet both opportunities had massive inherent value in pursuing. We faced a real challenge figuring out which way we wanted to go. We could make arguments in favor of both the land purchase and the trip, until we realized that our values could solve it in mere moments. Travel is fun, but it is not one of our values. Home, self-determination, and animals are values of ours. One of the expenditures didn’t fit our values, and the other one did. We put in an offer on the land and opted not to go on the trip. To this day, we are unbelievably grateful for the property.

It also makes little decisions easy. I was in the USA this month presenting, and I had a great time. But we had a new puppy at home that was too young to go into a boarding kennel, which meant that our plans for a five-day couple’s trip were no longer feasible. Since animals are one of our values, we were happy to prioritize the puppy over travel. It still made sense for me to go on the trip because self-determination is my number two value, and the conference allowed me to have the opportunity to network with people I only get to see at this specific conference as they come from across North America. However, because Mark and I had to be apart and my number one value is my relationship, I was only gone for 36 hours. Just enough to have good conversations with those connections, present twice, and then come back home.

This is where not only having values comes into play, but also having a ranking for those values. It’s not enough for something to meet three of my values. If it meets the bottom three values but actively goes against my top two values, it’s still not worth doing. This process almost creates an algorithm through which every life decision can be filtered.

And the best part is, even when you make what seems on the surface to be a tough decision that leaves you disappointed in missing out experiencing the thing on which you’ve passed, you actually end up feeling grateful. As long as you make a decision based on those values, you can confidently state going forward that the decision you’ve made is the one that leads to the most happiness, based on the information available to you at the time.

Flipping to the professional side. Your company might have corporate values through which they make decisions, gearing them towards marketing to a certain kind of clientele or hiring the right people. You hear about corporate culture, which is often driven by values—or the lack thereof, in which case unintentional values may present themselves in the void.

If your company has values, you can use that lens to make your own decisions in both your career and when leading your own teams. For example, at my last company, they had a strong set of values that permeated the core culture. They set one-year goals and three-year targets that aligned with those values.

When I met with my team every December to plan what our group would accomplish the following year in alignment with those values, we would engage in our own value-setting and goal-setting exercises under the backdrop of the corporate ethos. We discussed who we wanted to be and what values resonated most significantly with us as a group. We picked “Work Smart, Play Always” (thanks, Simon Sinek), which nested nicely within the existing values of the company.

We then dove more myopically into the individual topics or classes of tasks our group could perform. We looked at externally facing client deliverables and projects, internally facing initiatives, and individual goals for career growth. For each, we asked ourselves how we could do good work and have fun in an impactful manner. How could we improve the quality and effectiveness of our client facing deliverables? How could we gamify internal education initiatives within the company, and how we could each individually grow in the directions we wanted? We were leveraging each other’s strengths and supporting each other’s weaknesses as a team, rather than developing our own goals in isolation.

One individual in the group was incredibly detail-oriented and wanted to lead technical initiatives while growing their technical proficiency. The development of white papers and internal presentation content landed on their shoulders. Another individual wanted to develop their client-facing skills, so they were tasked with increasing their project management skills and external client-facing presentation skills. A third individual wanted to enhance productivity and camaraderie within the group, so they took on the task of evaluating existing documents, policies, and processes to find and remove pain points. The entire team actively participated in the team and individual goal setting exercises because everyone benefited by aligning and not duplicating efforts. This strengthened the ability of each member to achieve their goals (tied to KPIs and Bonuses) while also maintaining alignment with the corporate values.

In closing, I want to stress again that defining your values is crucial in both personal and professional contexts. Values give you clarity and direction, enabling you to make critical decisions with incomplete information. Let’s repeat that: your values allow you to make critical decisions with incomplete information, which applies to pretty much every decision we face. You don’t have to have the numbers, the timelines, or the details dialed in. It means you must know what you value most and what you don't. Living by your values provides a gift in that you won’t end up regretting decisions made, even if they don’t turn out the way you expected. The anxiety that diminishes when you reduce fear and FOMO, combined with the compounding success you achieve through these aligned decisions, makes the simple exercise of defining and adhering to your values incredibly worthwhile. This clarity takes a weight off your shoulders indefinitely. That’s a real gift, isn’t it?

(Postscript: I love talking, and about this topic in particular. If you are every wanting to chat more about it or have clarifying questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Until then, I sincerely hope that you do the 25/5 exercise, and maybe even pull in your professional team or your significant other to do it with you.)