ยป HOWTO: Figure Out Your Values
I want a list of my values to experiment with personal branding and just to see what all the fuss is about. I don’t think sitting down and thinking hard about it is the right way to generate the list. So here’s what I did instead:
- recruit n family members, good friends and ex-significant others
- take this list of 374 values and divide them randomly amongst your participants so that each gets 374/n values
- ask each participant to choose 374/n2 that they believe you hold (they should find this easy)
- for each participant, take the 374/n values chosen by other participants and ask them to choose the top 374/n2 of those (this will be much harder)
- rank the values based on how many participants chose each one: the top couple are your values
For example:
- I chose 4 family, 5 friends and 2 ex-girlfriends as participants*: n = 11
- I dealt the values in alphabetical order to make 11 lists of 34 values each
- each participant selected 3 values from their list, giving me 33 selected values
- each participant got a list of the 30 of those values they hadn’t seen before
- each participant selected 3 values from the second list
Note that all the values are positive: they’re different from characteristics. It’s important to stress that your participants are supposed to be making their best judgement on your internal nature: they’re not supposed to be saying what they like best about you or pushing their own beliefs. I chose plurality runoff voting because I believe it’s the easiest system for the voter.
* One of my friends took a bit of convincing that this wasn’t a test of him; one of my ex-girlfriends completely refused.
Awesome.
Is 11 a large enough sample?
I don’t like how step 5 only says the “top couple”. I’m terrible at statistics, but I imagine that you have the numbers here such that you could plug it into some model or another to assign a confidence to each of the selected values.
Or hmm… because your people selected them, does that mean that all 33 are to some extent valuable (i.e. there is no noise?). Damn.
Ryley
6 Jul 09 at 3:10 pm
The more people you include, the less they know you. I guess you could come up with some sort of weighting system? Maybe a values market?
Every item on the final list has been selected by at least one person, but without independence of irrelevant alternatives. Since this is essentially a voting exercise, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem says that it’s impossible to do it right.
Some of the highly-ranked choices on my final list are obviously not orthogonal. I say “top couple” because I haven’t figured out how I want to deal with that.
Jared
6 Jul 09 at 3:39 pm
The trick with this system is that basing your personal brand on positive values ignores all your negative ones. Gordon Ramsay’s personal brand is successful because of his negative values, not despite them. The world loves justified narcissism.
I suppose that’s a language trick though. Positive and negative values are essentially the same thing — there’s no dichotomy. English just forces you to pick a side of the coin.
Sunny days wouldn’t be special if it wasn’t for rain. Joy wouldn’t feel good if it wasn’t for pain.
Jack
6 Jul 09 at 3:47 pm
@Jack: The values are all phrased positively so that they can be compared accurately. Every one of those values can be given a negative spin.
Some values I ascribe to Ramsay: aggressiveness, assertiveness, boldness, candor, certainty, control, correctness, decisiveness, determination, etc.
Jared
6 Jul 09 at 3:55 pm
[...] Jared on Wednesday, 2009-September-23rd at 9:54 am A while ago I polled my family and friends to get a list of values that they think I hold. The list my method produced was obviously not orthagonal: some values, such [...]
Status Update on My Values Project | MentalPolyphonics
23 Sep 09 at 9:54 am