My personal values by which to lead life (and business):
Seek to optimize/ maximize
- Growth: seek realistic challenges and incremental improvement over stasis or apathy in all my key areas; pursue knowledge and wisdom; promote new experiences and adventure; cultivate a builder mindset
- Substance: prefer content to presentation, meaning to superficiality, genuine character/ integrity to appearance, real life experience to materiality; seek to achieve worthwhile goals; strive for competence; work for merit; avoid ego and prestige; exercise discipline over instant gratification; be competitive to peers given similar opportunities/ talents
- Joy: smile more; seek enjoyment/ humor/ satisfaction; use proper perspective; be realistic but bias towards good/ cheer/ optimism/ hope/ positivity/ gratitude instead of bad/ glum/ pessimism/ dispair/ negativity/ jealousy
- Camaraderie: seek connection with like-minded people (community/ tribe), seek fellowship/ companionship with people I admire and like
- Efficiency: seek value; evaluate resources (time, money, effort)/ risk vs. reward; seek a balanced judgment of benefit vs. costs, result vs. waste, prudence vs. spontaneity; consider trade-offs
- Intentionality: live deliberately and with purpose; persevere with determination against obstacles; avoid inertia and indecisiveness; enforce boundaries on social circle
- Tranquility: do not engage in or be disturbed by trifles or matters beyond my control; seek to first understand not diagnose; listen more and talk less; seek peace; be humble
- Expressiveness: verbalize feelings and thoughts– others cannot read my mind; strive for openness and assertiveness
- Leadership: seek opportunities to contribute, make a positive impact and to serve and benefit others; add value
- Respect: be sincere and courteous; be tolerant and respectful of others, and their different values and opinions; practice compassion
Seek to minimize/ satisfice (Disdains)
- Injustice: think fairly and act with integrity; do no hurtful deceit and wrong no one by deliberate injuries or omitting benefits that are my duty; seek truth
- Confinement: seek self-determination and self-sufficiency; freedom to chart my own course/ self-actualize; strive to earn by merit and for emotional/ financial independence; value flexibility and optionality
- Disorder: seek and create structure/ systems over chaos and scatter; avoid inconsistency/ unreliability; manage time and space well; keep clean
- Extremism: avoid extremes both good and bad; strive for balance
- Complexity: strive for simplicity and modesty; avoid unnecessary sophistication; prefer intrinsic to extrinsic rewards; “as few you can, as many as you must”