What If You Don’t Know Your Values or Dreams?
In earlier articles, I brought up the three purposes of money that Financial Mentor (Todd Tresidder) believes exist:
To live your values.
To live your dreams.
To reduce negative stress.
On one of his recent Office Hours calls, he asked the participants if they could think of another purpose of money that he had left off.
No one offered a different one.
I wasn’t on the call, but I later listened to the recording.
I thought about it myself and could only come up with one possibility:
Perhaps money can help you create a new identity for yourself.
Is that really different from living your values or your dreams?
I’m not sure.
It’s probably a subset of one or both of those. And, depending on the circumstances, it may also reduce negative stress.
Overall, I think his is a very good list.
One participant, however, asked a terrific question:
What happens if you achieve financial freedom from needing a paycheck… but you don’t know what your values are, and you’re not sure what dreams you want to pursue?
How does retirement turn out then?
That’s a great question to ponder.
Personally, I have always struggled with defining my core values.
I could quickly list a few that sound right, but then comes the harder question:
Do I actually live my life in alignment with them?
One thing I did just this past week, partly because I had this question on my mind, was check in with ChatGPT.
I asked it to take its best shot at identifying my core values based on our text conversations.
I was impressed.
Its initial response was surprisingly coherent and detailed. After a few iterations, the list felt remarkably accurate.
I plan to continue using these values as a guide for making sure my life—and how I spend my time, energy, attention, and money—remains aligned with what matters most to me.
Here they are, in alphabetical order rather than rank order:
Authentic Becoming
Authentic Creative Expression (I often think of this as Creative Integrity.)
Beauty
Contribution
Deep Human Connection
Freedom
Learning
Meaning
Play & Aliveness (my version of “Fun in the Sun”)
Simplicity
Interestingly, I see eight of these as more operational values.
The other two—Authentic Becoming and Meaning—feel more like outcomes that naturally emerge from living the other eight.
The metaphor that comes to mind is a tree.
The eight operational values are the roots.
Authentic Becoming is the trunk and canopy growing upward.
Meaning is the blossoms and fruit.
I like that image.
It also fits nicely with my ideas about person-place fit that became central to the design of my Zeroscaping game, which I credit with helping me develop the freedom to live my truth.
In many ways, this blog is really about helping people authentically become themselves—or, as I often put it, live their truth.
The methods for doing that are what my focus on Radical Lifestyle Design is all about.
One thing noticeably absent from the list is health and fitness.
Yet I devote a tremendous amount of time and attention to both.
Why?
Because I don’t see health and fitness as values unto themselves.
I see them as being in service to these deeper values.
Being healthy and fit gives me more capacity to live them.
What About Dreams?
Now that’s trickier.
At least it has been for me.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about my vision of the good life and how to radically design a lifestyle that I genuinely love.
One thing I’ve discovered is that no matter how vivid my dream or vision may be, reality is always different once I begin living it.
Action teaches what imagination alone cannot Fathom.
A big part of the purpose of this blog is to document that process.
In many ways, I’m conducting action research.
I’m a case study of one.
Take my quest for Rivendell.
Have I found it?
Yes… and no.
Am I still searching?
Absolutely.
Have I learned a tremendous amount simply by taking action?
Without question.
Will the search ever end?
I honestly don’t know.
But I do know that I’m becoming much clearer about what I Love about a place.
The same is true of my encore career as a Traveling Troubadour.
Is what I’m building exactly what I once imagined?
Kind of.
It’s still unfolding.
It, too, is a quest.
I still have a long way to go.
I’m often unsure what the next best step is.
More and more, though, I’m learning to jump into the abyss and see what happens.
It’s a heroic journey.
And perhaps that’s exactly what dreams are meant to become—not fixed destinations, but living adventures that reveal themselves only after we begin walking the path.
We will see …