Today is a daunting day. I have been putting this off for the longest time but I think it is finally time. It feels like the great big test like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter or the picking of a faction in the Divergent. I’m going to explore my values today.
I have placed a lot of importance on my values and rightly so— it orients people’s life goals, company’s missions, and visions, acts as a decision-making tool, and helps pick a suitable life partner among other things.
Here’s how I look at them— We are constantly bombarded with stimuli and are presented with endless opportunities. However, this begs the question why do we pick certain paths or choose to react to certain stimuli over others? The simpler answer is your sum total of experiences and your programming— nature and nurture.
The nature aspect seems to be strongly interlinked with the Big Five Aspect scale— Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These traits seem to be mostly pre-determined according to social scientists. Is it fixed though? Not completely. Looking at the Big Five Aspects Scale through the lens of a spectrum would be the best way to consider it.
You have a strong genetic predisposition to fall on a certain range of any one scale and you can move in either direction of the scale through say nurture, but the further you get away from your genetic predisposition, the harder it gets to make progress towards the extremes.
For example, consider an imaginary character— Sergei. Sergei is an introvert, highly agreeable, and low in conscientiousness by nature. However, if Sergei was handed his dad’s business of pimping and running Moscows most popping brothel and was trained with the right amounts of reinforcement, he could be a little more extroverted, disagreeable about the rates, and develop some work ethic (even in a loosey-goosey business of pimping).
Your values, however, seem to me to be dictated by your experiences and nurture. You can consciously pick say five of your values and decide to orient yourself using them. It is important to note that not all are consciously picked, you seemed to have already picked your values without giving them much thought or a name to this internal motivator.
Today is the induction of my values into my life. Although I have a vague idea of what they might be, they get a name today and will act as the five pillars upon which my decisions and life will be based. (Values are subject to change. Maybe it’s not that serious.)
Wish me luck.