My Values

I believe it’s useful for most humans to understand why they make decisions and to have some way of deciding which decisions to make and when. There are various forms – things like codes of ethics, manifestos, and statements of intent all make sense for different reasons. What I find most useful for me are my values.

My Values inform the way I make decisions I can be proud of. They do not guard against bad decisions (we’re human after all), but they help create a ‘default’ set of behaviours through which I interact with the world.

The first draft of these was written back in 2019, and have iterated a little since, but the act of writing them down has changed my life – by writing them down they have *become* default behaviours. I need a new place to put them and I umm’d and ahh’d over whether making them public is the right thing to do – would it change the way I use them? The answer is a definitive no. In fact, I believe that making them public might even help someone else; that idea is very values aligned.

Generosity

Prioritise others needs above my own, within safe limits of my wellbeing

When I wrote my own obituary one day, an exercise in summarising what I hoped would appear on a headstone or in a newspaper once my short time on this Earth was up, I landed with “He gave more than he took.” Since then, this is how I’ve lived my life.

How do I define generosity? The ability to give without expecting anything equivalent or material in return. I do get something in return, but it doesn’t take from the other, it comes from within. More on this in a moment.

There are a few ways to be generous. One can be generous with time/attention, money, knowledge, power, or anything that is ‘traded’. In my mind, there is no heirarchy of needs because those who often need generosity from others have different priorities themselves. Some need the basics – food & shelter. Some need help with self-actualisation; career direction or conflict management. Acknowledging that we all start from different places of privilege, there is no better or worse need. Ok, maybe that’s not fully true, no one needs this cup printer, for example. But in general, that’s not what people ask for.

Of course, there’s a tendancy to think that generosity has a relationship with martyrdom but that’s not quite true, either. To be honest, giving time, attention, money, knowledge, and power to people does make me feel good. It energises me. It’s a difficult feeling to describe, I guess, but there’s something about the ability to see something that you do change the environment or people around you for the better that’s incredibly rewarding; I guess that’s why I like Design.

So, yes, generosity is all well and good but it’s tempered with regular self-assessment on my capacity to give. I also value my own wellbeing (implicitly, most of us do) and so ensuring that stays in balance helps me decide when, how, and how much to give to others at any given moment.

What are my generous behaviours? Here are a few:

1. Money – about 20% of our income goes to organisations who are doing work that align with our values. Specifically, they are The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and The Australian Wildlife Conservancy.
2. Time – I volunteer for the Open Food Network as a board member
3. Knowledge – I coach several digital product managers and designers through whichever phase of their career or conflict they’re in.

 

Compassion

Be upfront and sincere about what I say, do, and promise. Acknowledge the power of honesty to hurt, harm, and upset.

Acknowledging that every human plays different versions of themselves in front of different members of the community (there is, generally, a ‘work’ me, and a ‘home’ me), I value living truthfully.

Life is short, too short for silly games like political positioning, ‘feats of dominion’, or drama for the sake of drama. People are complex, and relationships between people even more so. The fastest way to simplify all of that and truly help each other is through honesty.

When I interact with others, I’ll tell it like it is. How I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. It is, in some ways, a bit like the concept of radical candour but, well, sometimes people confuse that with simply ‘being a dick about it.’

I like to think what I practice is compassionate honesty. Honesty with the lens of giving someone more – dignity, respect, truthfulness – without taking those things away. It’s a tricky balance, and I don’t always get it right.

There are consequences to all we say and do. Living dishonestly creates an additional level of emotional labour for me and those around me. In a world that’s overwhelming enough as it is, who needs to give oneself even more to manage?

Living truthfully is difficult. It touches on the value of white lies (which I’m OK with, sometimes, by the way), and means one needs to develop a higher level of compassion and emotional awareness to make ‘judgement’ calls about what the most honest thing to do is at any given time. But, you know what, the alternative, living dishonestly, feels so incredibly difficult that honesty takes precedence every single time.

What do honest behaviours look like?

1. Honest with myself – I’m not scared of death, but I fear mortality. It feels too short a time on Earth; like a character in a movie who you just begin to get to know before they’re killed off in the first act. Acknowledging this feeling and idea has helped me make more decisions I can be proud of. I’m also afraid of loneliness in old age; that’s a real risk for me.
2. Honest with others – Acknowledging there are different levels of honest that others are comfortable with. Some folks can find pure honesty incredibly confronting, especially if they’ve lived a life where inauthenticity has been pervasive or have been around other humans who’ve normalised dishonesty. Honesty is as much about ‘reading’ the room as it is radical candour. Honesty without kindness is, well, that ‘being a dick’ thing again, and I try to avoid that at all costs.

 

Wisdom of age

There will always be more than I am capable of knowing. A lot of people have learned a lot of things before me.

As I age in a world that prioritises novelty & newness, I find myself coming back to history and the elderly. Those who have, in the big scheme of things, been here and done this human thing before.

I recognise that it’s impossible to know everything, but through collaboration and knowledge-exchange, we can do a pretty good job of creating a more fair and just society and improve the way we live with the non-human world over time.

The length of an average human life is both its strength and weakness.

On one hand, it’s short. We have, throughout history, generally struggled to imagine the ramifications of our actions beyond the length of a single human life. In other words, it’s hard to think or care about 200 years before or after the 100 years or so we inhabit the Earth. This makes it difficult to act now in the interests of the long-term or consider the knowledge gained before as relevant to today.

On the other hand, the shortness of our lives provokes action. No matter how much we’d like to defer the ideas of our own mortality, there is, quite literally, a deadline. And we know that humans can be motivated by that.

Wisdom, in some ways, gives me an advantage. Wisdom means that, in the big project of human life on Earth, the answer probably exists already and the way to find it is often in those things we don’t value inherently – listening and reading more than talking and acting. It also means listening to those who most of us no longer listen to for reasons of being ‘too old’, ‘too conservative’, ‘too radical’. It’s more than about breaking the filter bubble, it’s recognising that everyone in the human project has learned something given the life they’ve lived, and stuff’s more interesting and you can make better short and long term decisions when you know about it.

In my early consultant days, I thought I was getting paid to say stuff; anything. Recognise a pattern you’ve seen before, diagnose the problem, deliver the solution that worked last time. But now I realise that a consultant is really mostly about listening but it’s disconcerting for someone to pay for something that appears so passive – so again, a balance needs to be struck.

What behaviours are driven by this value? Glad you asked.

1. Listen more than I speak
2. Seek out diversity of opinion, perception, and world narrative
3. Act kindly because the world is much bigger than me and chances are I know very little
4. Read history (or, more interestingly, opinion through a historical lens)

 

Curiosity

Ask why. A lot. Why of others, sure, but also, and more importantly, why of myself.

Our brains are wired to make automatic decisions, most of the time. It doesn’t like wasting energy on repetitive or low risk tasks. But understanding what’s automatic and what isn’t (and why), is something I aspire to in myself. I also expect it from others, sometimes.

Reason is a loaded term, having been adopted by mathematicians and philosophers alike. But, as a value, I tend to throwaway those ‘hard-lined’ rules of reason and it’s cousin, logic, and focus on the awareness that we, as humans, are perceptual creatures shaped by our environments more than we’d like to acknowledge or more than we understand. We commonly ascribe behaviour we witness in others to the responsibility of the individual but, in fact, it’s almost always more complicated than that.

Valuing curiosity can be unhealthy – especially when I set my own standards for exploration, quite often, far higher than what I perceive from others. I am still working on ‘accepting’ that not everyone cares to think about how and why they do certain things. In a world of increasing fragmentation and personalisation, there is no easy line to draw between someone’s experience and their behaviour. There is no ‘common sense’, and that’s OK, because it means we need to accept the complexity of our lives and approach each other with compassion and kindness. I like that way of living. It’s good for me and good, so far, for those I care most about.

And so, with a recognition that I cannot control anyone’s behaviour but my own, I simply have reasons for what I say and do. Whether that’s a design choice, a life choice, a relationship choice, a movie choice, I find myself valuing the awareness behind those choices. And sure, sometimes, there are instances where I’m just creating a story for myself to explain some unexplained or automatic behaviour, but I’m OK with that. No one is perfect.

What this looks like day-to-day:

1. I ask why… a lot
2. I try to cultivate patience and understanding of ‘unpredicted’ behaviour (of others and myself)
3. Seek answers from others to leverage the diversity of our lived experiences
4. Rest (because asking why a lot and not getting answers most of the time is tiring)

 

Vulnerability

It’s OK to not know, or to be scared sometimes. In fact, if that doesn't happen, something's wrong.

When I was younger, I was afraid of things – monsters under the bed, saying no to drugs, going to university. And now that I’m older, I’m still afraid, just, you know, of different things – what will old age be like for me? What will happen when I lose my parents? What if I had to do a job I hated because I needed the money?

I value this acknowledgement of fear and imperfection in myself, and I value it in others. I have a deep belief that humans build trust through vulnerability, not the other way around. It goes something like this:

I share something vulnerable with someone – admitting that I don’t know the answer to a question in a high-paying consulting gig where everyone thinks I should know it. There will be two responses. The first is someone who says, “What are we paying this guy for?” and the other one, which happens much later, in private, where someone in that room says, “Hey, I really liked the way you admitted you didn’t know, I feel the same way for this other thing.”

I firmly believe that humans trade in vulnerability. When someone offers something to us that is clearly vulnerable, some of us feel compelled to ‘even the balance’ and offer something back. Once two people make that exchange, trust builds and deeper connections form; sometimes it becomes better working relationships, sometimes friendship, sometimes love. I’m old enough now to know that, for me, relationships are what make life meaningful, and vulnerability is the tool for forging those relationships.

Living vulnerably is not always easy, but it looks a little like this:

1. I will admit when I’m genuinely afraid and there’s no way back. For example, are we going corporate bungee jumping? Great, I won’t participate because I’m terrified of heights.
2. I will admit when I’m genuinely afraid but believe that, with a little help, I can get there. For example, making big financial decisions in companies. Finance isn’t my strength so I need help.
3. I constantly and actively work on my ability to listen. This may sound like a cop out (don’t we all listen?) but there’s listening and listening. To be honest, I didn’t know that until I had someone properly listen to me. It’s about being curious, being OK with silence sometimes, it’s about responding, in a full-bodied and complete way, to the story, event, or emotion someone is trying to share. Then, it’s about using compassion to explore that, with curiosity, together. It’s about meeting someone at their level of vulnerability at any given time, and creating a space, through my actions, in which they feel comfortable to take one step at a time. My genuine friendships, mentorships, the way I manage people, the way I build a deeper relationship with my partner are all based on this so it’s the one that I will compromise on the least. It is, in my experience so far, the deepest part of being human.