How to Live By Your Values This Year
If today was the last day of your life, would you be happy with how you’re about to spend it?
Steve Jobs famously said that he would ask himself this question each morning. I’ve found that continually asking this question is both one of the hardest and most valuable things you can do as a founder.
It's hard because it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of making your company succeed. It's valuable because the only way to make the stress worth it is to be working on something that matters to you.
I learned this the hard way in the mid-2010s, when I was three years into running my first real business. What started out as a side project—a three-month hacker retreat in Costa Rica—had turned into a travel company doing half a million in annual revenue. However, as the business grew, I found myself in a role—and a life—that left me feeling unfulfilled.
In response to the pressures of building a bootstrapped business, I had become increasingly driven by loss avoidance. We made a few key decisions to make the business viable—raising prices and targeting higher-income customers—but these same decisions also moved us away from aspects of the work I had found meaningful and rewarding.
Three years in, we had built a sustainable company, but one that I no longer wanted to run.
This happened because I'd lost touch with my values. Each individual business decision was economically rational but didn’t take into account what I ultimately wanted my life and work to be about. Altogether, they added up to a life that didn't work for me.
If, instead, I'd been more in touch with what I wanted out of my life and work, I believe we could have built a business that was both viable and meaningful. But how can we stay in touch with our values as we go through the grind of building a company?
Over the last several years, I've immersed myself in the values literature coming out of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and it’s been the most potent tool I’ve found for optimizing for meaning in life and work.
In this piece, we’ll explore values in more detail and how they can help you stay connected to what matters, so you don’t end up with a business that works—and a life that you hate.
What are values?
In ACT, we think of values as what we ultimately want our lives to be about. They’re about how we want to live our moments, knowing that we’ll die someday.
If you were to ask the average person about what they value, they might say something like, “work,” “family,” or “spirituality.”
In ACT, however, we don’t see these as values; we see them as valued domains—areas of life within which one can express any number of different values.
Click here to read the full post on Every