Values: Initial Thoughts

Alright — I committed to it last night, and here’s my follow-through.   The only place I know to begin my own quest for “success” is with my values, the things which are most important and significant in the way I live my life.  I know the things that I want to be important, I think, but that doesn’t mean that my priorities always follow suit.   And while I want to eventually get to the place where I’m carefully considering how my values are and aren’t impacting my actions, for now I really just need to sort through the values themselves.  Like I mentioned, considering the concepts is far more beneficial for my processing than outlining concrete steps.

So, by way of introduction, these are the things that I want to value.  And while they’re generally in the order of which I want to be most important, the ordering of my priorities is one of the things that I plan to consider, and potentially alter.

1. God.  I’m a religious person.  I believe in Mystery.  Specifically, I believe in the mysteries of Jesus.  “Valuing God” is a ridiculously large umbrella, I recognize, and encompasses a whole host of subcategories: Christian community, evangelism, prayer, personal growth, and so forth.  I’ll have to flesh these out over time, but for now it should suffice to say that I want express the value of God in my life.

2. Family.  I’ve been blessed with an incredible wife, and I’m the luckiest man alive to get to spend the rest of my life with her.  When we have children, I know that the same will be true of them, as well.  I want to care for them and provide for them, to share with them all of what is important.  The same is true of the family that raised me, and the family that raised my wife — they have given me so much, and I want to live in such a way that they know that I value them, as well.

3. Career. When I mentioned this project to a good friend of mine this morning, she shared a piece of advice that she received many years ago: “Success is getting paid to do what you would be doing anyway.”  I like that idea, and I want to consider it more carefully in future posts, but at least for now it expresses what I want to value in the work that I do.  I want to do work that I enjoy, and I want to earn something for it.  I want to value meaningful work, and I’m comfortable valuing money and financial stability — especially as it relates to the security and comfort of my family.

4. Friends. Or, to state it a bit more broadly, relationships.  I love my family, but they cannot — and should not — meet all of my social and emotional needs.  Moreover, I have the ability to meet the needs of people in my life in ways that others cannot, and so I feel responsible to do so.  I want to value the people in my life and live in such a way that I can impact them for the better.

5. Recreation. I want my life to be fun, and not all business all the time.  I value fun, and I value the power it has to change the way we feel or the way we see our circumstances.  In whatever form it takes, I want to value fun, and light-heartedness, and even frivolity, to appropriate degrees.

As you can see, all of these values are quite broad, and they each cover any number of other, smaller values.  There are even others I could list — I value education, and technology, and health, and confidence, and so forth — but the five listed above are the overarching values around which I would like to organize my life.  The others are secondary values; I value them not independently but in relation to one or more of the above categories.

Now I’ll just (“just,” as though it’s a small undertaking!) need to consider each of them, to unpack them and find out why and how I want to express these values.  And if you, readers, think of any such categories that I’ve excluded, be sure to let me know!