Articulating a value in words doesn't necessarily help you live it better. But you still might want to write out a value you have for various reasons, including:
- To tell someone what's important to you.
- To find others who share the value, by circulating a text.
- On a design project, to set a clear objective, or to check if users share the value, and whether your design helps them live by it.
- To inspire strangers. If you phrase your value correctly, people who don't have that value yet might see the wisdom in your value when they read it. They will think to themselves "I should try being that way!".
Each of these has different requirements, in terms of copy. But there are some things to keep in mind that will help with all four.
Preliminaries
Before you start, make sure the idea in your mind is a real value.
Values are often discovered by: admiring someone, appreciating something in nature or human life, having difficult emotions (especially doubt, confusion, helplessness, shame, embarrassment, regret, grief) and realizing a new way you wanted to live or something that was newly important to you, or experimenting with how you try to act in a certain kind of situation.
In particular, make sure it's not a feeling or experience, a goal, or an internalized norm.
The 3 Parts of a Value
An articulated value should have three parts. (1) The Context, (2) The Attentional Policy, and (3) The Source of Meaning.
Checklist in writing out a value
Avoid Vagueness and Poetry
The most common error is vagueness. Values are precise enough to guide you in specific concrete situations that you face in life.
Avoid Images to Live Up To
People also tend to confuse values with internalized norms, or self-expectations. But these have a different form. Internalized norms are images to live up to, rather than instructions to follow.
The following are images to live up to. In each case, they don't tell you how to do the thing.
- "Criticize people in a way that doesn't upset them". This is clear, but doesn't show me where I should direct my awareness. (It's about a goal with other people).
- "Stick together through thick and thin". I can imagine what I'm supposed to do, but it's still just an instruction. Like "stay calm", it won't guide me towards what is important when I am making real choices.
- "Stay calm, and don't take things too personally". This is perhaps decent advice, but it's also an instruction, and doesn't help me focus my awareness on relevant choices.
- "Don't feel resigned and isolated in difficult situations". This points in the direction of something important, but also isn't actionable. It doesn't really foreground choices that I could make.
Include the Context
All values have a context. Being 'kind and gracious' might be someone's value when socializing with friends, and being 'ruthless and harsh' might be a good way to live in a martial arts class. Having a clear context helps articulate the other two parts of a value.
Include what you pay attention to
You can always view a value as a bit of advice about what to attend to. It's a kind of instruction that's like, hey, in this kind of situation, pay attention to this.
Include what's meaningful
A value should also give at least some readers a sense of why it's meaningful to live that way. Not everyone will get it, but the text should contain clues about why it's important to you to pay attention to that rather than other things in this context.
Something like "not having to worry about how I look" is not a value, because it doesn't name the thing that's meaningful. It might name an important step in creating meaning, but it doesn't name what's meaningful itself. So if you start writing something like this, ask "how is it that I can be when I'm not worrying about how I look?"