Finding Your Values: The Framework That Actually Helps

I spent two years half-interested in the FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early. I’d read the blogs, run the calculations, lurk in the forums. The math made sense. The promise was compelling: escape the grind, live on your own terms, never worry about money again.

But I couldn’t commit. Something felt off.

I’d optimize my savings rate, then let lifestyle creep undo it. I’d read another “I retired at 35” post and feel… nothing. Not inspiration. Not envy. Just a quiet dissonance I couldn’t name.

It wasn’t until a friend asked me a simple question that the whole thing unraveled: “What would you actually do if you retired at 35?”

I didn’t have an answer. Or rather, my answer revealed the problem: “I’d probably just build more things. Work on projects with people I respect. Learn new skills.”

I didn’t want to retire. I wanted to work. I wanted to create. I wanted to collaborate with people who challenge me to think differently.

The FIRE movement promised freedom from work. But I valued the work itself—at least the right kind of work, with the right people, on things that mattered. The goal was solving a problem I didn’t have.

This realization led to a more uncomfortable question: if I’d been optimizing my life toward the wrong goal for two years, what were the right goals? What actually mattered to me?

I had no framework for answering that question. I had ambitions, sure. I had things I enjoyed. But I couldn’t articulate the underlying principles—the values—that made some paths feel right and others feel hollow.

Turns out, I wasn’t alone.

Three Ways We Lose Touch With Our Values

We don’t usually sit down at 18 and consciously choose our values. We absorb them. From parents, from culture, from algorithms that learn what keeps us scrolling. By the time we’re old enough to examine them, we’re often already living by principles we never chose.

The Inheritance Trap

A friend of mine spent seven years in law school and Big Law, checking every box on the “successful life” checklist. Partnership track. Impressive apartment. The respect of family and colleagues.

She was miserable.

Not because law is inherently soul-crushing, but because she’d inherited a definition of success that didn’t fit her actual values. Her parents valued prestige and financial security—reasonable values shaped by their immigrant experience. She’d internalized those values without examining whether they were hers.

When she finally quit to work in legal aid, her parents were devastated. She was relieved. She’d been optimizing for someone else’s scorecard.

This is what I call living by absorbed values. We mistake “what I was taught to value” for “what I actually value.” The inheritance feels like identity until you interrogate it.

The Optimization Trap

Then there’s the opposite problem: you do examine your goals, but you optimize for metrics that don’t connect to meaning.

You want to “be healthy,” so you track steps, calories, sleep scores, HRV. You hit your targets every day. The dashboard is green. You should feel accomplished.

Instead, you feel like a very efficient machine with no idea why it’s running.

This is the trap of quantification without purpose. You’re achieving, but toward what end? You’ve turned life into a series of optimizable variables without asking what the optimization is for. (We’ve written about this particular flavor of emptiness before—the feeling of doing everything right while feeling nothing at all.)

The metrics become the goal. The original value—maybe it was vitality, or longevity, or the ability to play with your kids without getting winded—gets lost.

The Everything Trap

The third trap is claiming you value everything.

You value family and career success and health and creativity and financial security and adventure and community involvement. When forced to choose, you feel paralyzed. Every option seems equally important.

But values only become useful when they help you make decisions. If you value everything, you value nothing. You’re back to decision paralysis, except now you’ve done the self-reflection work and still can’t move forward.

The problem isn’t that you don’t have values. It’s that you’ve never been forced to examine which ones are actually driving your choices, versus which ones sound good when someone asks.

What Are Values, Anyway?

Before we go further, we need to separate values from goals.

Goals are destinations. “Get promoted.” “Run a marathon.” “Learn Spanish.” You arrive, you check the box, you move on.

Values are directions. “Growth.” “Discipline.” “Connection.” You never finish. You keep moving toward them, making choices that either align with or contradict them, for your entire life.

Values aren’t aspirational statements. They’re the principles that already inform your decisions, whether you’ve named them or not. The work isn’t inventing values. It’s discovering which ones you’re actually living by, versus which ones you wish you were living by.

And here’s what makes this complicated: values don’t show up the same way in every part of your life.

Someone who values autonomy might express it by freelancing instead of taking a corporate job. But that same value shows up differently in their relationships (needing space, resisting enmeshment), their physical health (rejecting prescribed workout plans), their learning (preferring self-directed study), and their environment (designing a home office that’s entirely theirs).

This is where a framework helps. Rather than thinking about values in the abstract, you can start noticing patterns across the different domains of your life. (At Activities Matter, we think about these domains as five core pillars: Mental Wellbeing, Physical Wellbeing, Relationships, Pursuits, and Environment—but the labels matter less than the practice of looking across contexts.)

When you see the same theme emerging in how you work, how you relate, how you move through the world, you’re getting close to a core value.

A Framework: Values by Domain

Values aren’t infinite, but they’re also not neatly categorizable. Different frameworks cut them up different ways. What follows is a taxonomy, not the taxonomy. Think of it as a starting point for pattern recognition, not a complete map.

Achievement Values These are about competence, impact, and growth. They include:

• mastery (becoming excellent at something)
• excellence (high standards for your work)
• recognition (wanting your contributions acknowledged)
• impact (seeing tangible results from your effort)
• growth (continuous improvement)
• competition (measuring yourself against others or your past self).

People strong in achievement values are driven by progress. They need to feel they’re building something, improving something, doing something that matters. The FIRE movement didn’t resonate with me because early retirement meant stepping away from these values. I wasn’t trying to escape; I was trying to do better work.

Connection Values These are about relationships and how you show up for others. They include:

• belonging (being part of something larger)
• intimacy (deep one-on-one connection)
• contribution (giving to others)
• service (helping, teaching, caring)
• collaboration (creating with others rather than alone).

People strong in connection values feel hollow when they achieve in isolation. A promotion that requires sacrificing relationships feels like a loss, not a win. Remote work might technically offer more “freedom,” but if it cuts you off from collaboration, it violates a core value.

Autonomy Values These are about self-direction and independence. They include:

• independence (making your own choices)
• freedom (lack of external constraints)
• self-direction (charting your own path)
• control (influence over your circumstances)
• privacy (protecting your inner world from intrusion).

People strong in autonomy values chafe under micromanagement even when the work itself is interesting. They’ll trade higher pay for more control over their schedule. They need to feel they’re the author of their life, not following someone else’s script.

Security Values These are about stability and predictability. They include:

• safety (physical and emotional)
• stability (consistent circumstances)
• predictability (knowing what’s coming)
• order (structure and systems)
• tradition (continuity with the past)
• loyalty (reliable relationships).

People strong in security values are often mischaracterized as “risk-averse.” But it’s not about avoiding risk—it’s about building foundations. They need to know the ground is solid before they leap. A “great opportunity” that requires uprooting their life every two years isn’t great if it violates their need for stability.

Experience Values These are about sensation, novelty, and living fully. They include:

• adventure (seeking new experiences)
• novelty (variety over routine)
• pleasure (enjoying the moment)
• beauty (aesthetic experience)
• play (lightness, humor, fun)
• spontaneity (resisting over-planning).

People strong in experience values struggle with routines that others find grounding. The same vacation spot every year feels like death. They need variety, surprise, delight. Optimization for its own sake—hitting the same targets day after day—feels suffocating.

Meaning Values These are about purpose and authenticity. They include:

• purpose (working toward something larger)
• authenticity (living in alignment with your true self)
• integrity (consistency between values and actions)
• truth (pursuing what’s real)
• spirituality (connection to something transcendent)
• justice (fairness, correcting wrongs).

People strong in meaning values can’t just “do the job.” The work has to mean something. They’d rather earn less doing something that aligns with their principles than succeed at something that feels hollow. They’re the ones who can’t shake the feeling that they’re supposed to be doing something else.

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This isn’t exhaustive. You might value things like creativity, or humor, or intellectual rigor that don’t fit neatly into these categories. That’s fine. The point isn’t to find your values on this list. It’s to start noticing themes.

How to Find Yours

The first method is the simplest: look for the pattern.

Look for the Pattern

Values reveal themselves through repetition. Where does the same theme keep showing up across different areas of your life?

Let’s say you value autonomy. Here’s how it might manifest:

In your pursuits (work, hobbies, skills): You chose freelancing over a stable job, even when the stable job paid better. You prefer self-directed learning over classes with fixed curricula. When you pick up a new skill, you resist tutorials and want to figure it out yourself.

In your relationships: You need more alone time than most people. You love your partner but resist moving in together because you need your own space. When friends plan trips with rigid itineraries, you find excuses not to go.

In your physical wellbeing: You tried CrossFit but hated being told what to do. You’d rather go for a run on your own terms than join a running group with set meeting times. The idea of a personal trainer sounds more like surveillance than support.

In your mental wellbeing: You keep a journal, but you’d never join a therapy group. You read philosophy on your own but avoid academic settings. You need time alone to process experiences before you can talk about them.

In your environment: You’ve designed your living space to be entirely yours—no compromises, no input from others. You work from home not because you’re introverted (you’re not), but because you can’t stand open offices where you don’t control your surroundings.

Same value. Five different expressions.

When you start logging what you actually do—not what you plan to do, but what you’re already doing—patterns emerge. This is where a tool like Activities Matter becomes useful. When you categorize your activities across these five domains (Pursuits, Relationships, Physical, Mental, Environment), you start seeing these cross-cutting themes. The app doesn’t tell you your values. It gives you the data to discover them yourself.

Follow the Friction

The second method is to notice where you feel inexplicable resistance.

What decisions should be easy but feel impossible? What advice makes perfect sense but you can’t bring yourself to follow? Where do you feel the guilt/resentment dynamic—guilty for not doing the “right” thing, resentful when you try?

I have a friend who values security but lives in a city that glorifies risk-taking. Everyone around her is starting companies, quitting stable jobs to “follow their passion,” celebrating failure as learning. The ambient pressure is enormous.

She stayed at her corporate job. Not because she lacked ambition or courage, but because she’d watched her parents lose everything in a recession. Financial stability wasn’t boring to her. It was a foundation that allowed her to enjoy life.

But she felt guilty. Like she was playing it safe when she should be bold. The friction wasn’t coming from her—it was coming from the mismatch between her values and her environment’s values.

When you notice that friction, don’t dismiss it as weakness or fear. Ask: what value am I protecting? What would I be giving up if I followed this advice?

Sometimes the answer is: nothing important. The resistance is just inertia. But often, the answer is: I’d be violating something core to who I am.

Find Your Non-Negotiables

The third method is to look at what you’ve already walked away from.

What made you quit a job, even when you couldn’t quite articulate why? What ended a relationship that looked perfect on paper? What “opportunity” did you turn down that everyone else said you’d regret?

I quit a high-paying consulting job after eighteen months. I couldn’t explain it. The work was interesting. The people were smart. The exit opportunities were excellent.

But I’d wake up every morning with a low-grade dread I couldn’t name. I’d sit in meetings where we’d spend three hours optimizing a process that saved the client $50k, and I’d think: who cares?

It took me years to understand: I value impact and meaning. I need to feel the work matters, not just that it’s executed well. Consulting violated those values. I was being paid to optimize things I didn’t believe mattered.

The clarity came in reverse. I didn’t identify the value and then quit. I quit and then reverse-engineered the value from the pattern of what I couldn’t tolerate.

Your non-negotiables are a shortcut to your values. What have you already said no to, even when saying yes would have been smarter?

Notice the Energy

The fourth method is to pay attention to what leaves you energized versus depleted.

Not what you’re good at. Not what you get paid for. Not what people praise. What makes time disappear? What conversations could you have for hours? What problems make you angry in a productive, mobilizing way?

Someone who values growth will feel energized by challenges that stretch them, even when they’re frustrating. Someone who values connection will leave a party with fifty acquaintances feeling drained, but a two-hour dinner with one close friend feeling recharged.

This is harder to notice than it sounds because we’re trained to override our energy signals. We push through fatigue as a virtue. We ignore the depletion and focus on the achievement.

But energy is data. When you finish an activity that should feel like an accomplishment but instead feel hollow, that’s a signal. The activity might be admirable, but it’s not aligned with your values.

Activities Matter’s mood tracking pairs what you do with how you feel afterward. Not in the moment—in the moment, lots of things feel good that leave you depleted later. But over time, patterns emerge. You start noticing which activities consistently energize you and which ones consistently drain you, regardless of whether they “should” feel good.

This is data you can’t get from introspection alone. You need the record. (We’ve written before about why traditional journaling often fails here—it’s too unstructured to surface these patterns. You need a framework.)

What to Do With Them

Once you’ve identified your values, you have a decision filter.

Not just for career moves—though that’s part of it. For daily activities. For how you spend your evenings. For which commitments you say yes to and which you politely decline.

This is the real work. Identifying your values is the easy part. Living by them is harder.

Because living by your values means saying no to things that are objectively good but don’t serve your principles. It means disappointing people who have different values. It means accepting that you’re optimizing for the wrong variables by someone else’s metrics.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

You value growth and mastery. Your job is stable and comfortable. Your manager likes you. Your performance reviews are excellent. But you’re not learning anything new. The decision: stay in a comfortable situation that’s not aligned with your values, or take a lateral move to a role that will challenge you, even though it looks like you’re stalling your career progression.

You value connection and intimacy. Your city has amazing career opportunities and you’re building professional capital. But all your close relationships are back home, and maintaining them at a distance is slowly hollowing you out. The decision: stay where your career is thriving but you’re emotionally isolated, or move somewhere that makes less sense professionally but serves your relationship values.

You value autonomy and self-direction. Your team wants to implement a new project management system with detailed tracking and daily standups. It’ll improve coordination. It’ll make everyone’s work visible. It’ll violate your core need to work without constant oversight. The decision: advocate for your values even when it looks like you’re resisting “good” management practices, or quietly suffer the system that works for everyone else but suffocates you.

These aren’t hypothetical. These are the kinds of decisions people face constantly when they don’t have a values framework. They feel guilty for wanting things that don’t make sense to others. They override their instincts because they can’t articulate why something that should work doesn’t work for them.

When you know your values, you can at least make conscious trade-offs. You might still choose the career over the relationships, the stability over the growth. But you’re doing it with clear eyes, knowing what you’re giving up and why.

And sometimes, the clarity changes the decision. When I finally understood that I valued creation and collaboration over financial independence, the FIRE path stopped feeling like an option I was too weak to pursue. It was just the wrong path. For someone else, it might be perfect. For me, it solved a problem I didn’t have.

This is also where the Five Pillars framework becomes more than just a categorization system. Your values should inform how you balance your life across these domains. If you value growth but you’re spending zero time on pursuits that challenge you, something’s misaligned. If you value connection but your relationship pillar is neglected in favor of career advancement, you can see the mismatch clearly.

The app isn’t prescriptive about balance. It doesn’t tell you that you should spend equal time on all five pillars. But it shows you where your time and energy actually go, versus where you say your values lie. The gap between the two is where the work happens.

The Work Continues

Finding your values isn’t a one-time exercise with a neat conclusion. It’s a practice of noticing and adjusting.

You’ll discover new values as you age and your circumstances change. What I valued at 25—achievement, growth, autonomy—hasn’t disappeared at 35, but I’ve added connection and meaning in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. What you value in your 20s when you’re building a career is different from what you value in your 40s when you’re raising kids. Different contexts surface different priorities.

You’ll also discover gaps between your stated values and your lived values. You might genuinely believe you value creativity, but when you look at your calendar, you’ve scheduled zero time for creative work. That’s not hypocrisy. It’s just the messy reality of trying to live intentionally in a world full of competing demands.

But the practice of noticing—of asking “does this align with what I say matters?”—is itself valuable. Not because you’ll always align perfectly, but because the conscious misalignment is different from the unconscious kind.

When I optimize for income instead of impact, at least now I know I’m making that trade-off. I can revisit it later. I can ask whether it’s temporary or permanent. I’m not just drifting.

This is what self-knowledge as currency means. Not that knowing yourself solves all problems, but that it gives you the data to make better decisions. You can’t align your life with your values if you don’t know what they are.

The process I’ve laid out here—looking for patterns, following the friction, identifying non-negotiables, noticing energy—isn’t meant to be done once. It’s ongoing. Your journal entries, your activity logs, your reflections at the end of the year, they’re all inputs to this question: what actually matters to me, and am I living accordingly?

Activities Matter was built for this work. Not because an app can tell you your values, but because discovering them requires data you can’t hold in your head. It requires noticing patterns across months, not just days. It requires seeing the gap between what you say matters and where your time actually goes.

The app won’t do the hard part—the choosing, the trade-offs, the uncomfortable conversations when your values clash with someone else’s. But it’ll give you the information you need to make those choices consciously rather than reactively.

Start with the framework. Map your activities across the five pillars. Notice where the energy comes from and where it drains. Look for the patterns. The values will emerge.

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