18. Knowing my values and making good decisions
July 18, 2025
Have you identified your core values after reading last week’s essay? At least one or two? Have you figured out the degree to which they are incorporated in your life? I hope so! Would love to hear about it!
Let’s talk more about knowing your values and how important that is to living a good life. I’ll do that by connecting values to decision-making. In my view, decisions are the building blocks of your life. My education and career are in the field of Decision Analysis, an analytics field founded 50 years ago that grew out of economics, statistics, and behavioral psychology. The core questions in the field of Decision Analysis are: how do we make good decisions? And, what does it mean to make a “good” decision? The answer is that a good decision is a decision that is aligned with the decision maker’s values.
As we started discussing last week, not everyone knows what their values are. Often, we get caught up in wanting what other people want for us, and it takes some time and effort to dis-entangle from those expectations. Decision analysis teaches us that there is no one right/objectively “best” answer for any generic decision – because the best decision depends on what is most important to the decision maker. In other words, you cannot make a good decision if you don’t know what your values are.
Did you ever make a decision and then immediately feel like it was a mistake, before anything really changed as a result of that decision? That may have been because the option you chose was not consistent with your values. Your instinct knew, even if your mind did not.
An implication of having values of your own, different and distinct from others, is that your decisions will not always be the same as others. In my 20’s, I went to the beach with a bunch of friends for a week in the summer. We had been there for a few days, soaking up the sun, swimming in the ocean, enjoying time together. Then, one of my friends said – hey, does anyone want to go to a movie today? I was HORRIFIED. I mean, we only had like 2-3 days left at the beach, and I LOVED the beach, and thought that we should spend every minute of it outside. It turns out, she did not love the beach but agreed to come for a week because she wanted us all to be together. A few of my friends stayed back with me, a few went with her. I did not understand it at all. But that is because at that time in my life, I did not understand that everyone has different values, and we should expect people to want different things, based on their values. And that is ok. More than ok, good! Because it means people are in touch with what they care about and not simply following along with what someone else cares about.
Another example: my town has a compost drop off and I take my food scraps there. I do it because I understand that food waste in the landfills does not degrade properly, and composting gives those nutrients a chance to be recycled. This is important to me; I don’t know why – it just is. I know some people think it’s too gross or too much work to compost, and that does not concern me.I don’t need to change any one else’s mind or change the world – I only want to live my life according to my values.
We don’t talk much about values in our culture. We are such a diverse, varied, nuanced, beautiful cacophony of individuals, but our culture has some pretty strong assumptions about what we value. Let’s decide this for ourselves. Let’s not let the marketing experts or social media influencers tell us what we value. And our values may change over time. It’s good to take some time each year to think about what things are most important to me now, and how to shift my days, weeks, months and year to align with those things I value.
