Identifying Value Judgements
The public education sector encourages students to identify their values before experimenting with decision-making analysis and cost-benefit techniques. As a freshman in college, I was encouraged to “figure out what I stood for, then act accordingly” as an exercise in identifying personal value judgments. Professors explained that it would be “easier” to reach our “individual and personal” goals if we had a starting ground to stomp on. I use quotations to highlight the ridicule of the statement.
This may have made more sense 20-30 (or more) years ago. We no longer live in an industrial society. We no longer live in a push society. Things have changed, finally:
The internet means geography isn’t so important, so if you can find the 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people out there who want to make a certain kind of change and can connect them and show them a path, they want to follow you. And you can use that tribe, that group of people, to make change that matters.
I believe it’s a whole lot easier to know what you stand for when you are blessed with instant access to opinion, communication and live data. People my age have become naturally more impatient and self-entitled, appropriately. Why suffer through years of running towards an ambiguous goal, when you can experiment with your passions right now?
And finally. Along came the internet.
So what was once an old staple of advice to students beginning to study for their professional careers, identifying values has finally made a paradigm shift:
Experiment and make mistakes doing what you like now with the available tools you have been given. Figure out what you stand for later.
It’ll be a whole lot easier to idenfity your value judgements when you are happy with what you are doing.
