Top 8 Promising Tools For Founders In 2024 And Beyond

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SELF-HELP
Know Your Core Value to Build a Fulfilling Life.
How to clarify your core value.
Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

KEY POINTS-
A fulfilling life may align with your core value; however, you must define that value.
Every goal or opportunity has the potential to get you one step closer to, or one step further away from, a life aligned with your core value.
To clarify your core value, ask yourself "why” until you reach the fundamental level of your reasoning.
Most of us want a fulfilling life, but what stops us from achieving it? One reason is that we lack clarity on what a fulfilling life looks like.

I’ve coached YouTubers with millions of subscribers (and dollars in revenue), founders of Google-backed companies, serial entrepreneurs, and others who were successful on paper. Despite their accomplishments, they were not fulfilled by the life or business they spent so much time and energy building.

But why?
Because until we take a step back, dig deep into what drives us, and evaluate what’s important to us as an individual, we’ll never know what direction is worthwhile. So it's easy to feel lost and have no idea how to course-correct toward a fulfilling life.

This is why, when I coach clients who want to build a fulfilling life (and business), we start by clarifying their "core value," and then develop goals that act as stepping stones—with each goal taking them one step closer to a life aligned with their core value.

What is a core value?
Your core value is the one underlying value that unites everything you stand for. It’s the running theme across the times you felt most alive, what matters most to you, and the fundamental piece of what a well-lived life must include for you–however you define it.

It acts as a compass pointing you toward your true north, where you spend every day doing meaningful, purpose-driven work that fulfills you.

Distilling what you truly care about into a single core value can clarify what matters most, so you know what is worth focusing on and what to filter out.

For example, my core value is freedom. When I was offered a high salary for a job I wasn’t passionate about that required me to work 60 hours drowning in bureaucratic red tape, I asked myself: “Does this opportunity get me one step closer to, or further away from, a life aligned with my core value of freedom?”

It didn’t, so I declined.

This is why clarifying your core value can be such a powerful exercise: It helps you decide if your current actions will lead to a life aligned with what matters most to you.

Clarifying your core value is hard work and can take time. But once you do it, you’ll have clarity on what a fulfilling life looks like.

How to Clarify Your Core Value With the "Why Shovel" Technique
The "Why Shovel" technique is a simple but effective strategy to help you clarify your core value: Anytime you want to get to the bottom of a question—in this case, to clarify your core value—ask “Why?” until you reach the fundamental level of reasoning.

It may take one “why” or a few dozen. When you search for buried treasure, how deep you have to dig depends on where you start.

If you’ve done a lot of introspective work before, you won’t have as far to dig. But it'll take time if you’ve never thought deeply about what makes you tick.

So how do you know when you’ve dug deep enough? When you’ve learned to distinguish between fool’s gold and the real deal. When you can no longer point your finger at a specific person or entity (church, media, society, etc.) and say, “Because [authority] said this is a good value to have.” Otherwise, you’re still accepting inherited values—the ones other people have told you that you should have, not the ones you’ve chosen for yourself.

Here’s an example of how the "Why Shovel" helped “Mark” clarify his core value.

Example of the "Why Shovel" Technique
Helping people was important to Mark, but he struggled to pinpoint why. Here’s how one of our conversations went:

Me: “Why is helping others important to you?”
Mark: “Because I enjoy it.”
Me: “Why?”
Mark: “Because I need human connection.”
Me: “Why?”
Mark: “Because I used to tutor people and realized I was good at guiding them to answers and enjoyed seeing them progress. So I want to keep helping people.”
Me: “Why?”

Mark: “Because I believe if everyone tried to help each other out, we would be in a much better place as humans. Many people don’t go through the trouble of helping someone else, even if it doesn’t cost them anything.”

Now that’s the nugget of gold—the fundamental kernel of clarity that defines his core value. He values service to others because he believes the world would be a better place if more of us helped each other out. He doesn’t just enjoy helping people. He relates helping one person to a mission that spans all of humanity and has the potential to make a global impact. This is why helping people is meaningful, purpose-driven, and fulfilling work for him—not because other people told him it was good to do but because he’s developed his reasoning about why it’s important.

It's easy to achieve success on paper but feel unfulfilled because we spent our lives chasing the "wrong" things. But by practicing deep introspection and using the "Why Shovel" technique to clarify what we truly want that resonates with us on a fundamental level, we can take the first step toward ensuring our actions progressively move us closer to a life aligned with our core value.

Thomas Jefferson Was Right: Happiness Comes First.
“Care of life and happiness are the first and only object of good government.”
Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

KEY POINTS-
Honesty and quality of delivery of government institutions is strongly linked to citizens’ sense of well-being.
Whether year to year, or over a decade, when government delivery quality improves, citizen well-being improves.
Trust in one another and government institutions reduces quality of life deficits.

From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, the most revered writers of governing documents worldwide maintain that government shall uphold the quality of life of those governed. The American Declaration of Independence summed it up thus, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson, one of its authors, said, “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”

Yet, until recently, most studies measuring what most affects citizens’ voting decisions have focused on economic conditions rather than quality of life, according to a 2020 National Bureau Of Economic Research Working Paper Series, “Happiness And The Quality Of Government” by Helliwell, Huang, and Wang.

Until the inception of the UN World Happiness Report in 2006, empirical evidence linking happiness and government quality covered small populations over short time spans. The performance of political institutions was difficult to measure because they are slow to change.

Now more data is available and it replicates frequent earlier findings that the honesty and quality of delivery of government institutions have significant linkages to citizens’ sense of well-being. ‘Quality of delivery’ is defined as the average of four factors in governance: effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and absence of corruption.

Helliwell, Huang, and Wang confirm that changes in government delivery quality, whether year to year or over a decade, improve how citizens feel about themselves and their communities.

Trust and inequality
In 2014 and 2018, the Happiness & Quality of Government authors considered the effect of inequalities in financial status versus inequalities of well-being on citizens’ trust in one another and their government institutions. They found “substantial evidence that high trust societies are more resilient in the face of external shocks including earthquakes, floods, and economic crises. Individuals who feel that others can be trusted, and have a sense of belonging to their communities, are more resilient in the face of hardships ranging from unemployment and ill health to discrimination. Although any of those adverse situations significantly reduces an individual’s well-being, the loss is less for those who live in a high-trust environment."

Trust and belonging not only raise subjective well-being for all, but they also reduce inequality of well-being. Trust in one another and their government institutions upholds people who are subject to conditions that would otherwise be likely to place them at the bottom of the happiness scale.

A 2018 psychology study by Daley, Phipps, and Branscombe supports the positive impact of social and institutional trust, finding that the loss of a sense of well-being of children facing discrimination because of their disabilities is much less for those children who feel a sense of belonging in their local communities.

Also, in 2018 Helliwell, Huang, Wang, Goff, and behavioral economist Mayraz evaluated the sharply growing inequality of income and wealth worldwide over the last four decades. These inequalities have been linked to changes in several measures of well-being.

Considering the inequalities that cause happiness declines, these authors reviewed three large international surveys. They find that the gaps between a sense of well-being more negatively impact overall national well-being averages than widening income gaps.

They also find empirical support that those who favor equality are far more troubled by the widespread occurrence of well-being inequality than the widespread occurrence of economic inequality.

Participating in local government can make you and everyone else happier
There is good news from a 2019 study by Canadian psychologists, “Happiness and Prosocial Behavior: An Evaluation of the Evidence.” These authors find that prosocial actions improve the subjective well-being of both the givers and receivers of kindness, especially of kindness independently generated.

Helliwell, Huang, and Wang suggest, “Changes in the structure of government to increase the options for individuals and communities to share in the design and implementation of their own institutions is likely to improve [well-being] outcomes in several ways because such collaborations encourage engagement, increase the scope for innovation, and build social connections that raise subjective well-being above and beyond what they contribute to solving the specific problems at hand. This may be part of the reason why studies find that people are happier in more decentralized systems. Large negative effects of corruption on happiness may reflect in part that corruption lessens the extent to which citizens see themselves as parts of trustworthy collaborations to improve lives.”

The UN World Happiness Report and the studies that it generates resurrect the vision of the founders of participative democracies: governments of the people, by the people, and for the people can be a path to happiness.