What Do You Want Out of Life?

February, 2026

Table of Contents

Summary

Values help us to figure out what matter to us, and how much they matter to us. Values are the most important goals we have. We have these goals because we value them as they are. Not because we want to achieve them for something else. Goals are a way to get closer to our ideal self. We can have moral values such as integrity, respect, kindness that are separate from our other values such as friendship, health, family. We have to take moral path in achieving our values.

What do we want and what stands in the way

  • Uncertainty about what matters to you makes it hard to move forward. If you don’t really know what you want, it’s hard to know how to get it.
  • Conflict shows up in life as stress, frustrations & unhappiness
  • The kinds of conflicts that we’re focusing on in this book are the ones that inhibit our success in terms of what really matters to us.
  • What is a good life?
    • The way that we pursue a good life, no matter how it is defined—is by having goals, figuring out plans for attaining them, and acting on those plans.
  • Existentialism holds that there are no absolute values imposed from outside of us, but instead that things matter because they matter to us.
  • We are not radical choosers, because our choices are bound by what we are like.

What Turtles, Dogs, and Humans Have In Common

  • We can identify sub-goals or features of the goals involved in our major conflicts, too, and balancing these is crucial to success.
  • We have many different kinds of goals and they are not all at the same level of importance.
  • Goals are representations of a better state of affairs than the one we’re in, a state that is preferred to the status quo. They guide our actions and what we learn from experience about how to go on.
  • A goal-seeker—whether it’s a turtle, a beagle, or a human being—has to have certain motivations to keep it going.
  • Type A people are goal-focused, high-achieving workaholics obsessed with time management.
  • Values are our most important goals, and they help with goal conflicts because they tell us what we should prioritize and what we need to attend to in our efforts to compromise.
  • Values are also ultimate rather than instrumental.
    • What I mean by this is that the things we identify as our values, things like friendship, security, meaningful work, compassion, are likely to be things that we want for their own sakes rather than purely for the sake of something else.
  • Values are the ultimate goals that harmonize our desires, emotions, and thoughts.

What are our values?

  • If you are reflective about your goals, you already know that it is an ongoing process
  • Process of figuring of what matters, which way and how much is a process of deepening understanding and improvement

Introspection

  • What do I value?
  • If you can go wherever you can go, where would you go?
  • What qualities you want to preserve, if you are going to transported into another body.
  • Introspection might now revel things that we might not be aware, but visible to other people
  • Also, introspection will not revel, biases that we are not aware

Lab rat experiment

  • Remember valuing something is wanting it and feeling positive about it
  • Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
  • psychological needs for air, water, and food
  • Safety, belonging, and esteem
  • Many psychologists found out that basic human needs include
    • Relationships: The fundamental need to feel a sense of belonging and mutual connection with others.
    • Autonomy: The freedom to direct your own life and make choices that align with your personal values.
    • Competence: The sense of mastery and confidence that comes from effectively using your skills to achieve goals.
    • Security: The peace of mind derived from having a stable, safe, and predictable environment to call home.
    • Exploration: The intellectual drive to seek out new experiences, cultures, and knowledge to broaden your horizon.
    • Vitality: The presence of physical energy and mental "spark" that makes you feel fully alive and capable.
    • Pleasure: The immediate enjoyment and sensory satisfaction found in life's positive moments and comforts.
  • We have to get to specific to understand what we value
  • Stress and burnout are good signs to tell us what we value. When we miss them we feel stress and burnt out
  • Learn from the boredom, when you are bored that tells you are missing something from your values
  • Observing yourself as if you were a lab rat is a good strategy for finding out how you are wired emotionally, which is a useful information for figuring out your best values.
  • In this method, you have to ask when do you have different emotions such as, stress, boredom, excitement, flow state, and happy. Those emotion will clue into what is important to you

Guided reflection

  • People usually have conscious and non-conscious motives that aren’t aligned
  • To strengthen alignment, they suggest using our imagination to envision our ideal futures.
  • Our imagination is close with our hidden motives, it is easy to uncover our hidden motives with imagination exercises
    • What qualities you admire in others, what skills you want to acquire, what ideal family life you like to have
    • Use the prompts to spark your imagination

Learn from others

  • We learn from others and figure out what we do and do not desire, what we find enjoyable, exciting or peaceful
  • What may be less obvious than this is that we can also learn about ourselves from others.
  • Our friends and family can give us some clues on what we are like in certain settings, whether we are intelligent, competitive, and have empathy

Exploration

  • Exploration is important to the process of figuring out what matters.
  • In other words, there might be things that aren’t in your system of values that would suit the kind of person you are and fit well with your other values.
  • You can’t do what matters to you if you don’t know what it is
  • Figuring out our values is a working in progress, we have to be mindful about our emotions, mind states. Also, doing hypothetical exercises also can help us to discover our values.

How to resolve conflicts?

  • When we find something that aligns with out values, we are motivated to do it
  • We need to find values that are alignment with our environment
    • If you are living in tropical country, it is hard to value winter sports Three basic responses to the conflicts
  • Prioritizing and adjusting the means to ends
    • To prioritize the goals that are in conflict, we need to identify which are ultimate values and which are sub-goals that are more instrumental.
    • Adjusting means to ends should be a familiar strategy, because many of our goals are general enough that they can be pursued in multiple ways.
    • Adjust the means to end, means to figure out alternative ways to achieve the goal
  • Giving up conflicting goals
    • One problem with valuing wealth, fame, and status is that, these are relational goods. We have more of them when other people have less.
    • Hidden goals like these weaken the web of values by preventing us from pursuing our ultimate values and by blocking good feelings when we do manage to fulfill them.
  • Reinterpreting our values
    • Our values are interpreted different way, being a good parent is different for each person. Staying healthy is different for each person
    • Based on the circumstances we have to rethink our values and adjust their intensity
  • Reality Matters
    • The experience machine, a thought experiment
      • If there is a hypothetical machine that runs by world expert neuroscientists to mimic the reality. If you sign up to hooked up to this machine all of your experiences will be much better than what you have right now. Would you do it? Why?

Values in Unfair Culture

  • Resisting injustice by itself is a compelling value, it is not as hopeless as climbing Everest barefoot
  • Reality of socialization, sexism & conflict
    • In the US everyone is judge for spending time on activities that are not making money
    • Women at work consistently experience sexism
    • Spending energy managing relationships take time away from technical work
  • Figuring out what matters in unfair culture
    • The goal of never disappointing anyone is just not compatible with career success on any understanding of what that is, nor is it compatible with mental health.

When all else fails

  • What to do if all strategies to deal with conflicts fails
  • Making peace means refusing to commit to your undesirable goal as a value.
    • Inviting my inner-pleaser to the party is not the same thing as inviting her to the leadership circle, and I have to be on guard against her trying to take over.
  • If your current value system is no good, you need a radical change and need new value system
  • There are some basic psychological motivations that almost everyone of us has and has had since we were a baby. These are our needs for comfort and security, novelty, and excitement, autonomy (control over our life), competence (the skills to do what we want to do), and affiliation with other people.
  • Feelings are an essential part of our capacity to value anything. That means that if we are looking to make a radical change, we are going to have to find something we will respond to emotionally.

The value of others

  • We have others in our value system
    • We value for themselves
    • Activities that needs participation and approval from others
  • We need other people to be in our lives, participating in activities with us. We need the approval of (some) others. This is not a flaw or a weakness to be overcome. It’s just what we are like.
  • Other people in our lives influence what we do
  • You can help friends do all sorts of things just by being encouraging and supportive.
  • According to one of the few psychological studies on cultivating humility, another good strategy might be to reflect on your own limitations and your place in the grand scheme of things.
  • When we discover that a friend wants to lie his way to a promotion at work, or torture animals on the weekend, or give money to a white supremacist group, we can’t be humble about our differences.

Full-filling our values - Morally

  • Philosophers have often thought that these two points of view—partial self-interest and impartial morality—are two opposing forces, and I’ve been focused on the former.
  • If we were invisible, the conflict between what’s good for us and what’s ethical would always be resolved in favor of ourselves.
  • Immanuel Kant thought the conflict could be resolved by appeal to our own rationality.
  • Now, are my moral values profoundly different from the other values in my life?
  • If there are people out there doing just fine without being constrained by the moral values that the rest of us have, this might make us think that we are just suckers.
  • It should not surprise you to find out that moral values also tend to be well integrated into our systems of values.
  • We need people to be basically moral and decent in order to succeed, because so much of what we do depends on coordinating with others.
  • What do we do when moral values conflict with our other values and goals?
  • Also, do your fair share does have deep roots in moral philosophy. It is the strategy recommended by at least two longstanding traditions: rule utilitarianism and social contract theory.
  • Kant called these moral duties “perfect,” by which he meant that they are duties we must always perform.
  • Refraining from lying to advance your own goals is not itself a goal that should be fit together with the rest of them.
  • To return to our gardening metaphor, they’re like the boundaries of our property. As you’re planning your garden, you shouldn’t even consider planting things in your neighbor’s yard
  • We don’t garden with radical freedom, after all. We have to plant what will grow where we live.