Crafting an intentional life requires that you first reflect on and refine what really matters for you. Without an understanding of your values, strengths, and assets you lack the fundamental inventory that you require in order to determine what constitutes “high value time”. You also require this personal clarity to establish life goals and align them to your daily habits. Gaining this personal clarity is critical, but surprisingly difficult especially when you force yourself to actually write it down. At the same time, can you think of anything more important than investing the time required to sharpen your awareness of who you are, what you want, and how to sail toward that vision?
Your Core Values
Your fundamental “core values” are certain concepts and traits that you admire in others and hope to see in yourself. They are the often the underlying basic reasons that you make one decision rather than another. You don’t really need (for the purposes of this exercise) to understand why they serve this role in your life and why they excite and drive you. You just need to get a clearer picture on what they in fact are. I am personally excited when I see acts of courage. Global exposure and internationalism are critically important to me without further justification. Positivity is a character trait that I seek out and aim for in myself and seek in others as well. If you were to tell me that my services were required to help manage wealth for clients in an office based somewhere in Africa and that I it would be difficult and a little dangerous then your pitch is on track if you want me to accept the position! This proposition triggers my core values and gets me excited. Try the exercise on yourself now.
Do you know what your core values are? Take the time to write down 5 or 6 words/traits/concepts that capture those values as the first step of the fundamental inventory.
Signature Strengths
Do you have an outlier strength that really stand out? Are you a “numbers person”? Are you a born writer? Do you have social strong skills and enjoy relationship building? Do you get excited about speaking in front of large audiences? Do you have certain creative strengths?
Try to imagine the last time you lost yourself in an activity whereby time seemed to disappear and when you looked up from the task you realized you’d been at if for hours. Imagine activities that gives you a feeling of invincibility, or at least where you cant’ wait to hone your skills so that one day you might reach higher levels. You don’t need to be the best in the world at an activity for it to count as your signature strength! Just reflect on what you like and don’t like to do and where you feel you have some personal edge in terms of your predisposition.
On standardized tests (SAT, ACT, GMAT, LSAT, etc) did you tend to excel more on written or quantitative sections? Are there activities at work or in school that you love more than your classmates or colleagues? If I asked your partner about you what would they say are your strengths? Have you identified that some learning experiences simply flow and you’re excited about them (vs others that feel like “work”)? If you have strengths that are exceptional outliers that’s great, but this exercise works even on a relative basis if you cannot identify such an obvious point at this stage. Also bear in mind that it may take a lifetime of experimentation to refine your understanding of your strengths. Placing yourself in the path of a diversity of experience may help you to unearth greater self knowledge on these signature strengths.
Write down a couple strengths that you have identified as the next step in the fundamental inventory.
Monopoly Assets
The definition of “asset” is well known, but what are “monopoly assets”? I use the term “monopoly asset” to describe assets that you possess and that are difficult or time consuming for others to replicate. Monopoly assets are assets that form important ingredients in your personal value proposition and in your personal pricing power. If I have certain credentials that are necessary for performing a service and it is difficult for other to obtain those credentials then the market price of that service can be maintained at a higher level than if the credentials were simple to obtain. Monopolies are entities that operate with relatively low competition due to high or insurmountable barriers to entry for others. And monopolies have commercial pricing power because of this dynamic. If I identify a highly profitable activity but there are no barriers to entry (hard to obtain credentials, relationship building requirements, licensing requirements, language requirements) then soon competitors will flood in and the profitability and scarcity of that activity will be driven dramatically down. If, on the other hand, I am operating with certain assets that are difficult or impossible for others to obtain then I will have stronger commercial pricing power (for myself, my service, or my job security).
These monopoly assets are not the same as “strengths” and it may be the case that you possess certain monopoly assets that you really don’t require or that you just don’t care to use. It is important that you know and understand your monopoly assets but it is up to you how or whether you choose to deploy them commercially or as ingredients to elevate your well being. Let’s go through some examples.
If you speak more than one language then this ability to communicate is a monopoly asset. These foreign language assets may also be more or less valuable depending on context and location. For example, I speak native English. While I lived in the USA this was not a scarce or difficult to replicate asset. However, I now work in a German-speaking country and not everyone can read, write, speak, and persuade in native English with my same comfort level. At the same time, I do not speak German and therefore I lack that asset which would be quite valuable as well (it may be a prerequisite for some tasks in Zurich, but it is certainly not scares in this part of the world). Languages are a good example as they are also difficult to replicate on a short timeline.
Do you have a college degree in a certain specialized topic? That credential is a monopoly asset. Do you have deep relationships in a certain professional field? That personal or professional network is a monopoly asset. Have you worked in more than one field? Your credibility or credentials in these various fields are monopoly assets. Regardless of whether you are using them at the moment, these items represent assets that you may or may not choose to call upon but they are difficult to quickly replicate and constitute ingredients in your fundamental inventory.
Write down 5 or 6 examples of monopoly assets for this exercise.
Determining High Value Time
Once you have an inventory of your Values, Strengths, and Monopoly Assets it is time to get clearer on what constitutes high value time. Whether at work, at home, or at play, you know that not all time is created equal and some uses of your time simply matter more than others.
If you are engaging your signature strengths in activities that align to your core values and which draw on your monopoly assets then you are engaging in what I would characterize as high value time. Another cross-check when characterizing something as high value time is to check the extent to which your time satisfies “PERMA” criteria.
An Important Cross-check: PERMA
Martin Seligman, one of the foremost experts in the field of Positive Psychology (author of “Flourish” as well as “Authentic Happiness”) offers are very useful acronym for the ingredients of well being or rather as he puts it, “Flourishing“. He states that the following factors are critical to your well-being and if you succeed in driving them higher you will be on the path to “flourishing”.
- Positive Emotion
- Engagement
- Relationships
- Meaning
- Achievement
Now revisit your fundamental inventory thus far and consider again this question of “high value time” in the context of PERMA. I cannot think of a better life goal that than the pursuit of well-being or “flourishing”. As you consider the values, strengths, and assets you are working with and the ambition of driving higher these PERMA ingredients, how should you be steering your time? PERMA can help you to assess your fundamental inventory at a deep level. When we aim for intentional life design, what are we intentionally trying to optimize if not well-being? As you use the fundamental inventory and this lens of “high value time” use the concept of PERMA to audit whether your chosen current, neart term, and long term goals will likely drive PERMA higher. Compare options on these criteria as well as everything we do is a trade off against our other potential options.
Current, near-term, long-term Goals
Your goals are effectively what you are intentionally “up to” over varying time horizons and ultimately in your life as a whole. We all end up somewhere and writing our life story in reverse is relatively easy. Goals, however, imply that you have reflected and set a deliberate intention toward various future states. Where are you steering over 12-months, 2-4 years, and longer-term? And who do you hope to intentionally become across the totality of these varying time horizons? The odds of optimizing well-being are clearly greater if we are aligning values, strengths and assets to determine high value time and then deliberately set sail toward goals as milestones aligned to that awareness. But if that’s true then why do so many of us set out each day tackling our daily tasks but without such longer term plans? If we don’t engage is a degree of strategic goal setting then we are simply navigating daily challenges as they come. Of course we will all craft a narrative from the vantage point of our later years in a manner that stitches together a story for our earlier years. But crafting the “best-fit narrative” to our story after the fact and at the end is very different than steering with intention throughout.
Try to use your inventory to now steer with intention toward current, near term, and longer term goals.
Current Goals represent what you are up to this year. Current (this year’s) goals are often driven by shorter-term professional or occupational demands and that’s fine. But you should aim for your occupation to increasingly align to your fundamental inventory and to your near and long term goals. Sometimes current goals feel like they are driving us but the greater your overall clarity becomes, the more you will shift toward a driving seat including in the current time horizons.
Near term (2-4 year)goals are effectively your “development goals”. Aside from what you need to achieve this year, how are you growing and what milestones can you plot on the way to your longer-term ambitions. Note that on a near-term (and sometimes “current”) time horizon you can also cultivate new “monopoly assets”! What languages do you require? What relationships must you cultivate (relationships are the ultimate “monopoly asset”)? What skills will you develop? If these additional assets are important for you who wish to become in the long-term then place the development milestones in your near-term planning.
Long-term (5+, 10+, 20+ years in the future) goals are effectively a statement about who you want to be. This is your desired future state and what you aim to become. Long term goals really should not relate to a particular job title. These are your “personal growth ambitions” and define what winning in life looks like as a future state of being. When you imagine your future self, what does that state look and feel like? What are the daily routines you aspire to? Who are the people you serve as that future self? Which relationships does your future self find personally fulfilling? Your vision does not have to be detailed, but try on a future vision for size to see how the dream feels and whether it can motivate your earlier selves to work toward it. And continue to apply the PERMA criteria to your goals and your fundamental inventory to compare possibilities and audit whether your intentions seem to be on the right track.
Daily Habits Audit
Are you still with me? Do you have an inventory of values, strengths and monopoly assets? Have you reflected on what constitutes “high value time”? Have you considered current, near-term, and long-term goals? And have you considered these data-points through the lens of “PERMA” just to see whether you are driving the ingredients of well-being (or even “Flourishing”) higher in your life?
If so then now it’s time for the hard part. Pull out your calendar and start plugging in the systematic daily habits that you know are necessary as the under-pinning of this roadmap. If I were your coach and we were going through this written fundamental inventory (assuming you made it this far) then the next place I would challenge you would be on your calendar. Show me the habits in your daily calendar. Large goals are simply the compounded outcome of small habits. And if your habits are not written into your calendar then I would invite you to be a little harder on yourself.
Make an Appointment With Yourself
Let’s be honest. Most of us think the concepts I shared here sound good and plausible, but we don’t do it. If you read through this and thought it sounded logical but you did not go through the work and did not write it down, then it just doesn’t count. It is hard to do this and it is especially difficult when I ask you to write it down (written inventory, written goals, written habits in your calendar). We all feel as though we more or less know the answers to these questions. Since no one will ask us to turn this in as our work assignment we settle for the intuitive impression that we have privileged access to our own minds. We fool ourselves into thinking we don’t need a written inventory, written goals, or written habits in the calendar.
Trust me, we don’t have the clarity around these topics that we think we do and writing it down is hard. But don’t rob your future selves of this dose of intentionality!
Do yourself a favor and schedule a one hour meeting with yourself. I’m serious. Schedule an hour in your calendar at which time you will go into a room and you won’t leave until you have written down your inventory and your goals. You’ll feel silly, but that’s fine. Your mind will also wander in the process as well. And you might need (a lot) more time than an hour. But if your current self can put that obligation in the calendar then your future selves will really appreciate what might come out of this! Consider this the first draft of your future masterpiece.
If you would like a simple template for this exercise in order to steer your Fundamental Inventory then register your email on the home page and I will send it over to you right away.
*Thoughts expressed are personal reflections from the author not pertaining to or endorsed by any particular organization, nor does this constitute an investment or sales recommendation.