Finding my values
How I used Claude to find my values, why naming them gave me permission to stop caring about everything, and the site I built so you can do the same.
I spent some time figuring out my values last week. It took quite a while to actually figure out what my values are. I don’t know my values until I sit down and think about them. Once I did that, it all started to come together.
What I landed on
At the moment they are: growth, connection, influence.
I care about growth so damn much. I always want to try to learn new things, new ideas, and put myself out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I forget that it’s uncomfortable and hard so knowing that I value growth helps me reframe things a bit.
I also care about connection with my friends, family and partner. I initially had community on my list, but connection is actually more true to me. I don’t want a bunch of people around me, but I actually want to feel connected with the people around me.
The last one is influence. I care a lot about helping others grow, and helping the people I care about. I do find this plays into my goals for this blog as well.
Why it matters
The reason I did my values is that it’s helped me make decisions in my life and name what I actually care about. I found that doing my values has already had a benefit in making tradeoffs in my life. I often like to do everything. When you make a tradeoff about what you actually care about, then you realise that you can’t do everything and some things matter more than others. This was a huge unlock for me as it’s meant that I don’t have to care about everything, I just have to care about what matters to me. It’s almost permission to be myself in some ways.
What happened when I told people
After telling a few friends about how I figured them out, they said that they wanted the same thing. This inspired me to build out a simple website that would let other people use AI to help them find their values as well. I built it over the weekend, and it just runs in the browser, as I didn’t want to pay for people’s AI usage nor did I want to collect data about people’s values. I have no idea if people are using it or not, but just from the few friends who are, that’s enough.
Finding my values really helped me, and most people don’t necessarily do the work to figure them out. Once I tell them why they should and give them the path to do it, it’s really just up to them to get it done.
Hopefully you’ll get some value out of it as well so go check it out: https://values.lswith.io.
