What are values?

Values are a combination of inherited and chosen preferences about how the world should be. Often they're framed as being about what is morally right or virtuous or true. Values play a huge role in the decisions you make.

Lots of people aren't that aware of their values. They learned their values through immersion in whatever culture they were raised in, and their values don't stand out in their mind. They're "just the way things are."

Because values, whether we're aware of them or not, play such a big role in what we decide, they are the foundation of our destiny. Our values underlie the decisions we make, which influences what happens to us and how our lives turn out. We can't influence everything about our lives, but we do have decisions to make, and when we do, making the right one will have compounding positive effects for the rest of our lives, and making the wrong one will have compounding negative effects.

Values are the weights we assign, consciously or unconsciously, to the inputs into our decision making. A more heavily weighted value will influence the direction of a decision more than a lightly weighted one.

Exploring your values can help you learn [How To Do The Right Things Faster](/How To Do The Right Things Faster.html) which will have positive compounding effects throughout your life.

This is an index page that will list off several other pages that explore the definition and use of values.