Personal Values - How to know who you are and what you stand for

Personal Values

Author: Mark Manson Created time: March 12, 2021 8:36 PM Page No.: 50 Progress: ✔️

Values

Good values are:

1. Evidence-based

• That “cause” is often what we refer to as our “purpose” and finding it is one of the most important endeavors we can take to enhance our health and well-being. But our purpose should be sought not merely through what feels good. It must be considered and reasoned. We must accumulate evidence supporting it.

1. Constructive

• This is money for why what you value is often not as important as why you value it. If you value martial arts because you enjoy hurting people, then that’s a bad value. But if you value it because you are in the military and want to learn to protect yourself and others—that’s.

3.Controllable

• Money for the sake of money is bad value because you can’t always control it. Creativity or industriousness or a strong work ethic are good values because you CAN control them–and doing them well will ultimately generate money as a side effect.
• We need values we can control, otherwise our values control us.

E.g: honesty, building something new, vulnerability , standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.

Bad values are:

1. Emotion-based

• Psychological research shows that most of us, most of the time, make decisions and are inspired to action via our feelings , rather than based on knowledge or information. Psychological research also shows us that our feelings are generally self-centered, willing to give up long-term benefits for short-term gains, and ae often warped and/or delusional.

1. Destructive
2. Uncontrollable

• When you value things that are outside your control, you essentially give up your life to that thing.

E.g: Dominating others through manipulation or violence, fucking more men/women, feeling good all the time , always being the center of attention, not being alone, being liked by everybody, being rich for the sake of being rich, sacrificing small animals to the pagan gods.

How to change values?

• You can’t argue someone out of their values . You can’t shame them into valuing something different (shaming them actually often has the opposite effect—they double down).
• To let go of a value, it must be contradicted through experience. Sometimes this contradiction happens by taking the value to its logical conclusion. E.g. Too much partying ultimately makes life feel empty and meaningless.
• When our values fail, we have two knee-jerk justifications:

1. The world sucks
2. We suck

• So instead of chasing money all the time, you could chase freedom. Instead of trying to be liked by everyone, you could value developing intimacy with a few. Instead of trying to win everything, you could focus on merely giving your best effort.
• If your primary value in life is how much money you have, then you will always need more money. But if your primary value is personal freedom, then you will need more money for a while, but there might be some situations where you need less money.
• Ultimately, abstract values are values you can control. You can always control whether you’re being honest or not. You cannot control if people like you. You can always control whether you’re giving your best effort. You can’t always control if you win or not. You can always control if you’re doing something you find meaningful , you can’t always control how much you’ll get paid.
• Values are won and lost through life experience. Not through logic or feelings or even beliefs. They have to be lived and experienced to stick.
• The whole world cannot always be bargained with, nor should we subject every aspect of our life to a series of transactions. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect.
  • If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you.
  • The most precious and important things in life cannot be bargained with.
• Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself.
  • An adult will love freely without expecting anything in return because an adult understands that that is the only thing that can make love real.
  • An adult will give without expectation, without seeking anything in return, because to do so defeats the purpose of a gift in the first place.
• You are always free to choose. And not only are you free to choose, but you are obliged to choose who you are going to be, whether you realize it or not.

Fault

• It’s impossible to ever completely screw your kid up. But it’s impossible to make them perfect too.
• Let the child be who the child is going to be.
• It’s not all their fault. To be honest, at some point, it doesn’t even matter whose fault it is. Because it’s always your responsibility. So if it’s a big hole, start climbing.

How to Grow up?

FAIL

• Pleasure/pain values fail for the simple reason that pleasure and pain are bad long-term predictors of health, growth , and happiness.
  • What about lying to a friend? Or waking up early for work? Or, like, not doing heroin. Those are just a few of the millions of examples where pursuing pleasure/pain values will lead you astray.

Alcoholism isn’t bad because your body is a temple and self-harm is intrinsically wrong—those are adult values.

No, alcoholism is bad because it’s a bad trade-off. It hurts people. People who don’t deserve it. People you love and want to help. It fucks up other life plans. It destroys families, finances, and fidelity. It’s essentially giving up a mountain for a molehill.

• Adulthood occurs when one realizes that it’s better to suffer for the right reasons than to feel pleasure for the wrong reasons.
• Adulthood occurs when one realizes that it’s better to love and lose than to never love at all.