There is no inertia or silent study with the Stoic virtue of Wisdom. The Stoics taught that Wisdom is about knowing things so that we can do the right things. What good is virtue at all if we’re stuck at home with it? What good is it to have silent, inactive values and virtues? Most of us have core values. We know what’s chiefly important to us: love, health, honesty, freedom, etc. We can recite them when asked, but do we actively work on them?
About a year ago, I noticed in my own life that the things I valued most were taking a backseat to my career. The fortunate thing about this realization is that because of my career I’ve learned a thing or two about getting things done. For a salary, I spend a lot of time solving complex problems, breaking down enormous projects into manageable parts, and constantly optimizing for efficient results. This juxtaposition—my core values on one side sitting stuck in the mire of good intentions and my work on the other side constantly producing tangible results—led me to a powerful realization that I’d like to share with you today.
Getting smart with our core values
If industry is good for one thing, it’s getting things done. Strong businesses are built on mechanisms and techniques that remove good intentions and turn inputs into outputs. We need this with what we value most. We need to apply some result-producing methods to our love life, to our health, friendship, spirituality. Otherwise, our values remain as romanticized ideals trapped in a cloud, never raining down to water the roots of life.
“Waste no more time arguing what a good person should be. Be one.” — Marcus Aurelius
In this article, I’d like to share what I’ve learned since I had this epiphany. It’s based on some basic productivity and project management techniques I’ve picked up over the years working for a giant company. I’ll share how we can borrow a cup of sugar from big business and incorporate it into our own recipe for consistent results. This is about making the time and then using that time efficiently to uphold our values in daily life.
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Should is not an acceptable word in a business meeting. “We should review this again next month” or “I should contact the legal department to check on that.” It’s a red flag that means the thing is probably not going to get done. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But that’s not good enough. This applies equally to the things we value most. “We should start having date nights every week” or “I should call my old friends more often” or “I should check out the local health food store”. These are all good intentions, which are simply not good enough for producing actual results. The first step is to change that ‘I should’ to ‘I will’. But that’s just the beginning.
How to structure your pursuit of core values and virtues
To turn these good intentions into projects that produce real results, we need two things: structure and accountability. For the structure, you’ll need two tools: a pen and a journal. Without putting them in writing, your values get stuck in the cloud of good intentions. Writing down your plans also removes the bite of forgetfulness. Life is busy. Things come up. So, being able to go back and remind yourself by looking at what you were thinking last week is crucial. Writing is also essential for the accountability piece. You need to be able to track and measure your progress.
Now that we have our tools, we need a little structure. Most big projects generally flow through these phases:
- Planning and risk assessment
- Execution
- Measurement
- Review
I can think of no bigger project than a life lived in accordance with values and virtues.
Planning
This is where you work backwards from your desired result. Want to enrich your relationships? What are the actions that will get you there? How can you create the conditions for these actions to take place? This is also the moment for risk assessment. What are the potential blockers to success? How can you remove or mitigate them? I think health is an apt example to illustrate how risk assessment can be useful in our personal lives. Write down a quick list of health risks in your life. Then, think about how you can get smart about preventing these risks. Eating too much junk food? Maybe you can set up a recurring delivery of a box of assorted vegetables or healthy snacks. This makes an easy, automatic condition for the desired results to take place.
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” — Epictetus
Execution
Once you’ve worked backwards from the desired result and thought about how to tackle the inevitable obstacles, you should be able to produce an action list. There are two vital elements to add to each item of your list. First, you need a date by which you will complete the action. If you’ve been meaning to call an old friend, remove ‘soon’ from the equation and put a date on the calendar (consider using an actual calendar). Secondly, you need a measure of success. This may sound a bit complex and perhaps incompatible with personal core values like honesty, kindness, or community, but with a little imagination, you’ll find you can attach a metric to anything. More on measurement below.
Now you’re outfitted with action items so it’s time to build a schedule to ensure that the plan doesn’t accumulate dust when life gets busy. Creating a schedule to work on your values is perhaps the most important lesson I can share. You can embrace, discard, or adapt any of the ideas I’m sharing in this article, but if you don’t block out time to at least think about your values, they won’t budge.
Lifting all boats
Try identifying five to seven values you want to work on. Then, assuming they are equally important to you, block at least 30 minutes a day to work on them. Mondays are for health. Tuesdays are for relationships. Wednesdays are for creativity, for example. Create a separate section in your journal where the action plan for each value will live.
Get specific about the time of day, too. If these values are the most important things in your life—more important than work—then give them your best time. If you’re most productive early in the morning on your second cup of coffee, well, don’t fill this time replying to work emails. Instead, use this time for your values. Thirty minutes a day is not a lot and the boss’ email can wait. You will reply to it later because unlike our values, our jobs come with built-in accountability.
Measurement
Thus far, I’ve been relying on my corporate experience to share ideas on how you can work toward fulfilling your commitment to values. Like business, science is another field that wouldn’t exist without numbers and measurements. Even social sciences create proxy measurements to test hypotheses. Numbers don’t lie. The numbers themselves provide accountability. In relation to our key values and virtues, some measures of success may be obvious while for others we may need to get creative. Here’s a short core values list and an idea for how we could measure them:
Honesty: number of days without telling a lie.
Justice (in the Stoic sense): one altruistic act per month.
Responsibility: minutes spent reading to your kids.
Love: one extraordinary expression of your love for another person per week (e.g. writing a note, buying flowers, not doing that thing you want to do so that they can do the thing they want to do).
Community: invite your neighbors for dinner two times per year
Balance: reduce time working by X% and reinvest it into X activity.
Review
This is the time to check in on your dates and measurements. This is the final and therefore most essential element of accountability. There’s no use in creating timelines and recording data if you don’t review it. Did you miss a ‘deadline’? If so, don’t beat yourself up but figure out why it happened and revise your approach for next time. Did you spend fewer minutes this month exercising? Maybe there was a good reason and therefore no corrective action is required. Life happens. Or maybe it’s a trend. You’ve been spending less time exercising each month for the last three months. Maybe, upon closer inspection, you realize you’re bored with the type of exercise you’ve been doing and you need to change things up.
The review period is the moment for recalibration. Even with the best mechanisms and the right effort, we are always working against the backdrop of change. Our environment changes. The people around us change. We change. Review and reflection are the tools that enable reorientation, so that we can remain on a middle path, characterized by a healthy balance between action and rest and proper alignment with our values.
Correcting imbalance
We should also review the values themselves. When I first started doing this—building a schedule and filling it with mechanisms to work on my values—I had included financial stability as one of my values. It was a time during which I worked on things like learning about investing and looking for ways to reduce expenses. But I realized that I already spend an immense amount of time on money; my career. I also realized that I have natural motivations to work toward the outcome of financial stability. This was an imbalance, so I reviewed it, and corrected it to reinvest that time into my relationships.
“We need to regularly stop and take stock; to sit down and determine within ourselves which things are worth valuing and which things are not; which risks are worth the cost and which are not. Even the most confusing and hurtful aspects of life can be made more tolerable by clear seeing and by choice.” — Epictetus
Core values support life
Stoicism teaches us above all to live in accordance with our virtues and core values. It’s a bit like a field manual for life. Stoicism is an exercise to define what is important so that we can act it out. Often, we know how to turn intentions into actions, but we only do it to earn a salary. When it comes to our relationships, health, integrity, and all that we cherish intellectually, we are ineffective.
We fail to produce results in the areas of life that we value most because we rely on good intentions. We make the mistake of thinking because it’s important to us it will just happen. Rarely do things just happen—at least not consistently. Lack of plans, schedules, measures, and accountability is what leads to at best little bursts of ephemeral motivation and at worst nothing at all. The last tip I’d like to share is to have fun with this. Don’t let the measurements become the goal. The structures and mechanisms described here are meant to support life, not get in the way of it.