A helpful way to increase your likelihood to be successful in achieving something is reverse engineering the problem or task. Reverse engineering or back casting is simply working backwards from the end point. For example, Shane Parrish from Farnam Street explained when planning a route to hike instead of starting at the bottom, imagine you are already at the top and working backwards to find the best path. This practice and the skill of doing it well, can be extremely helpful when reviewing what you want most out of your life.
To know what you truly want in life, I believe you must know your personal core values. Through reflection and better understanding of who you are, you can better understand what you value, why, and then what you truly want in life. This process is not easy and is ever-evolving but the key is to start just like compound interest with investments. The biggest advantage is starting the process. In my experience, we are in pursuit of aligning our values with figuring out what we truly want out of life. Alignment is key to being at peace and doing things that align with what you value and who you want to be. It is difficult to answer the questions “what do you want out of life?” if you have not done the work to better understand who you are, who you want to be and what you truly value. Understanding those questions will make decisions and ultimately being your authentic self much easier.
What are your core values? Why?
Naval Ravikant, angel investor, entrepreneur, and philosopher provided a simple yet profound way to look at one's life; Wealth, health, and happiness. One of my really good friends actually uses these as his categories when planning out his goals for the year. Tim Ferriss also used these as titles to organize excerpts of his book. Naval explains that typically in life we pursue them in that order, wealth first, then health and happiness whereas typically the level of importance in living a fulfilled life is the opposite order. Happiness, health, and then wealth.
The key here is spending time being aware, reflecting, and doing the work to understand what your personal core values are. Maybe those core personal values also help create values that you have within your craft. For example, I have core principles within coaching performance and physical preparation that I lean on every day to make decisions. A great place to start is working through Brene Brown's Core Values list and circling 20 that stick out to you, then cut it to top 12, again to 6 then again if possible to only the most essential values that you hold close.
Top 20
Top 12
Top 6
Most Essential… Why?
Second part of the equation is then diving deeper to define what does wealth, health, and happiness mean to you. A great place to start is checking out navalmanack.com and checking out the book written by Eric Jorgenson that has consolidated a lot of Naval’s work on the concepts of wealth, health, and happiness. Even diving into how you define health can lead you down a path of investing further in yourself to what is truly important. For example, breaking up health into the 8 Dimensions of Wellness could be a good starting framework. Identifying what these eight categories mean to you.
Emotional Health
Physical Health
Intellectual Health
Occupational Health
Environmental Health
Financial Health
Social Health
Spiritual Health
There are so many different roads you can take. There is no right answer to defining you core values. The challenge is to go on the hero’s journey to figure out your own definitions. Similar to the ideas of the book, The Alchemist, you figure out your own personal legend; discover what you value, what is important to you, your purpose, and how you pursue it with all of your soul.
Naval’s book has challenged me to go down the path to define wealth, health, and happiness for myself. As well as how they connect with my personal core values. Would love to hear how others have worked through their core values and how it connects or aligns with how they are living out there life.
Share this post