What do you want? What do you actually want? How hard have you thought about that and what kind of time-frame have you thought about it in? If someone came to you and wanted an answer to this deep question of what you actually want, over the course of your entire time here on Earth, and wanted your answer right away in a five minutes or less blurb, could you answer them?
When I ask, what do you actually want? I want you to think of your entire life, I don’t care if you want a piece of pie right now or want to go see a movie this weekend or even if you want to have a successful career in your field in five years. What do you want to feel about your entire life when you’re old, dying, and desperate for social interaction? When you’re sitting in a chair all day because you can’t get up, and the thought of getting to your bed is exhausting. The moment when you’re alive but you understand that your life is over, there’s nothing more to do but to wait, you can’t change anything now. When that is you, how do you want to feel about the way you lived your life?
Think about all of it. Your actions, your interactions, what you think and do when it’s just between you and you. The pitfalls you’ll find, the hard times you’ll need to get through. The difficult people you will despise. The temptations that will try and change you. The easy paths filled with instant joy, followed by lasting despair. The hard paths that break you down, then build you back better. Think about being at your worst and most desperate and how you want to behave in that moment. Consider what kind of person you’d be when rich and powerful, what would you do with that power? Do you have vices, temptations, or weaknesses that will commandeer your power and wield your influence?
How will you get the results you actually desire, the results that let you sit in that chair and peacefully enjoy your past while you wait for the death you no longer fear? You won’t get the results you’re hoping for just by this thought exercise, or hoping things will go your way. You have to think through this to find out and to KNOW what it is you want in life, out of life, and from yourself in any situation. Once you’ve gone down this path of thought for a long hard while, you will need to figure out how to travel to the destination you’ve chosen.
Core Values and Principles are going to be your guiding lights on this adventure. Core values are laws written by you that govern you, and you alone. They are there to help you stay focused on what you’ve put a lot of thought into regarding how you want to live your life. You want to come up with core values that you could set in stone. A core value is sacred to you, you do not compromise on it, so think deeply on these and choose wisely. A core value that comes into conflict with a future governmental law should be a value you care so deeply about that you’re willing to break the law or move to a location with a different governing body that has no laws that conflict with your values. The core values you’ve chosen are there to carry you through treacherous territory anytime you face an extremely difficult situation, moral dilemma, or possible crisis of conscience. Core values guide your every decision, they are your blueprint for success and fulfillment.
Core values are laws and your guiding light, they are your big picture. Principles are like little lines of code that steer you away from errors, mistakes, and poor execution. You’ll want to write these with pencil and paper as you won’t get them perfect right away. These are to be tweaked and developed as you learn more about yourself, others, and the world. They are like maxims that you use to automate the way you navigate life. Most will be helpful to guide you to your core values, some might not directly get you there but they won’t interfere either. Principles are boiled down lessons you want to remember, solutions to mistakes you’ve discovered, and directions to keep you on the path you choose. They are the stock of your fully fleshed and thought out ideas reduced down, that you can flavor the rest of your life’s decisions with.
We live in a society that tries to create blanket values and principles and throw them onto anyone and everyone. No one can give you core values or even principles. You can develop some based on others, but both are some of the most personal things you can come up with. For this to work, you must put in the effort, put in the required deep thinking, and really explore who you’ve been, who you are, and who you want to be. Past, present, future. Learn from your past, act in your present, change your future.
Having deeply considered your core values and recording principles you’ve found to be true and effective will give you confidence in any situation you find yourself in. You’ll always have the answers and never need to look to other people or worry about your actions or decisions. If you’re living your core values and using your principles when they apply, then you will not feel inadequate. You will not feel less than. You will feel confident, capable, and correct. When you find a problem, a mistake, or a difficult situation it will just become an excellent teacher of a new principle for you. It will change from a feeling of impediment to a propulsion, launching you to new solutions you can then apply widely.
How to create your core values
Invert, reflect, and reduce. Rather than think about what you want or who you want to be, invert the problems and questions. What do you not want and who do you not want to become? If you know the type of person you do not wish to be then you should easily see the pitfalls and behaviors you want to avoid. If you think, “I don’t want to be a jerk”, then you can realize that a core value of yours might be to “Strive to understand before seeking to be understood”▼. As you have perceived that truly understanding someone and how they feel and think is a surefire way to care for them and feel empathy towards them, which will keep you from intentionally or unintentionally being a jerk to them. Most angry and rude people simply do not understand other people and are confused about particular situations, causing them to lash out or inadvertently upset others.
Next you should reflect. Think about your past actions and thoughts, review your life and behavior to find patterns and discover what you repeat, whether good or bad. This can show you what you desire that you might not have thought consciously about. This can be very useful to see behavior in yourself that you don’t like, then you can dig into that behavior to find the root cause. Maybe you lack self-confidence, this you would likely already know, but upon deep reflection you start seeing how you’re not taking care of yourself. You’re eating junk, consuming junk through TV, video games, social media, and scary news and you’re hanging around people that don’t treat you respectfully. You realize changing these things can boost your self-confidence. The inverse of those habits are what you desire. You do want to eat well, exercise, build your knowledge of the world and find like-minded people who will treat you with respect. Your core value might be, “Prioritize personal progress”, meaning first you eat right, first you exercise, first you educate yourself, first you respect yourself so that others follow suit; all before you do anything or think of anything else like eating a treat or watching mindless TV. You take care of yourself properly, and as a priority, and your self-confidence will take note.
Now reduce. What I mean by this is to take away parts of life. Think about a time when you were very sick, in bed all day and feeling miserable with no energy or motivation. On that day an outside force reduced your life for you. A gift you did not realize, because without motivation and energy you found there were many things you just didn’t care about. So many things you’ve spent your time on and wastefully worried about. So many things you may have let upset you. But in the middle of your misery there were things that mattered to you regardless of your state. Love for and from others. Financial security, cleanliness, and your health. You can use that moment of despair to find what matters to you even when everything sucks. Those are the things you should focus on when everything is awesome and you’re full of time and energy. You might list these things out and come to the core value of, “Focus on your foundations, and only move on to the walls and ceiling once the foundations are strong”, those important things are your foundations, with the walls and ceiling representing anything else that comes into your attention or life. Take care of your foundations in good times and bad, and you will always have something strong to stand on.
These are examples to help kick start the process, I’m not suggesting you need 3, nor limit yourself to 3. I do suggest you stay mindful of how many you come up with and whether or not there are redundancies in them. The core values you create should be short and clear, making them easy to remember so you have an instant reference at the ready when you need guidance in life. If you can remember 15 core values and you come up with 15 unique things you believe are important, go for it. But make sure they are unique, highly important to you, and easy to remember. That way they’ll stay with you and be easy to recall when needed.
Discovering Our Principles
Core values aren’t goals, they’re your blueprint for how you want to build your life. What you want to focus on, how you want to be, and what you want to make sure you think about everyday. Now we’ll switch focus to our principles. Principles are the road signs in your life. They help you make sure you’re on the right path, giving you a quick idea of which way to turn and whether or not to take an exit. They are the truths you’ve extracted from experience, deep thought, and experimentation. They’re born of mistakes, successes, and observations. Principles give you the right answer for specific situations. Where core values are the stars in your sky of reasoning guiding you to your chosen destination and helping to figure out answers your principles don’t cover. Principles must not conflict with core values, core values are absolute, principles are malleable.
Discovering your principles is a practice of awareness. Being aware of your behavior, the reasons behind it, and the results of it. Being aware of what repeatedly works and doesn’t work for you. Awareness of how things work and don’t work for others. It’s also a practice of reflection, thinking about and analyzing your mistakes. Why did they happen and how can you avoid repeating them? Another way to find principles is constant observation. If you’re always observing how life actually works, the causes and effects, and why people do and think certain things then you’ll discover useful principles.
Examples of Principles
Most of us work with other people which means we likely know of someone who has a habit of trashing others behind their backs. After some experimenting, you may find the best response is to give a non-reaction. Simply cutting into the middle of their conversation with an uninterpretable response like “huh” not stated as a question, supplying it with no emotion and walking off or continuing something you were doing is a great strategy to convey that you want no part in their behavior and that you don’t agree with it. Withholding any rewards they were seeking such as listening, agreeing, or being upset by it will help those people better their behavior and keep useless drama away from you. So, your principle could be to “reward behavior appropriately”. You will reward good behavior like someone’s kindness with your own kindness and you will choose not to give any reward to someone’s terrible behavior until they figure out how to correct it. Bonus points to anyone who can tell the rest of us the inspiration behind this principle.
Another way you can find principles that work for you is in maxims, a principle doesn’t have to be a maxim but you can find many maxims out there that you view as true which you can adopt as a principle. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a popular maxim you could use if you believe diversification is important. “Actions speak louder than words”, I find this a useful principle as it’s often the actions of people you observe that show you their true nature rather than the words they feed you. Someone can tell you they’re sorry but then they keep doing to you the thing they say sorry for, the repeated action shows you they’re not sorry or they don’t care. They think they can carry on with the offending behavior as long as they give you that one word. Actions are also a great way to show people your true self. Maybe you’re not a great communicator, but you care deeply for friends and family and for whatever the reason you have trouble conveying that with words. But through action you are repeatedly the one that is there for them, always willing and wanting to help and always a source of love for them. Through actions you are loudly exclaiming how you feel about them, even when lacking the words.
Principles are your ideas on the rules of the world and of life. They are your reminders of how to shape your actions and your responses to reality. You can and will get them wrong from time to time. That’s why they are malleable, they are rules for behavior and sometimes you will find out that what once seemed to work every time no longer works the way you expected, and it must be tweaked or removed. They are how you will optimize your actions and reasoning to respond to people and events with lighting speed and as close to perfect precision as you can get. Over time you will build a list of principles that seemingly cover all aspects of life, but don’t stop there, you should constantly review these and be thinking whether or not they still hold true. Whether or not they still produce results you desire. Unlike core values, which you should be able to set in stone, these will be something you revise with trial and error.
Creating your core values and finding your principles is a great way to truly discover who you are and what you need to do in order to become who you believe you can be. Once armed with these weapons of mass direction, you will be confident in yourself and how you’re living your life. Now go out into society and help others become the same.
