A short instructional YouTube monologue (by James Lim) teaching a simple exercise to identify personal values by mining past memories. The speaker recommends reviewing life periods (e.g., ages 8–14, 14–18, 19–25), listing standout events (achievements, moments when you were "in the zone"), and extracting marketable skills, talents, reputation signals, and childhood interests as clues to core values and strengths.
Chapters
So you're not totally sure what your most important values are. In this video, you'll learn a simple exercise that can help you identify what your values are without having to conjure up a perfect view. We can look at our past as a source of data that is true to us. We don't spend much time reviewing what's happened and can miss strong patterns and correlations. So we're going to do a little exercise. Think of it like mining for gold. Memories are stuck with us for a good reason. Our minds want to want to store good or bad experiences. We can extract insights from these, which can be really useful to figuring out what we value. They can be during school periods or any other peak time in your life. It's a good way to extract observations and insights from something you know and has worked well for you. It's particularly useful if you aren't in a situation that lends itself well to a good journal. For example, if you're trying to figure out what you value recently or perhaps you're currently not working. Once you have a selection of events that have happened in your life, you can look to break them down to give you clues. So one thing to bear in mind is that prospective bosses are looking for marketable skills. So looking back at your work experience, for example, think about key activities, marketable skills, talents and strengths, your reputation and what you are known for. And looking further back you can look. You can start to think about what childhood interests you have. What did you enjoy doing as a child? Because often these things stay with you throughout your life. One way to look at this is to separate your periods of your life. And typically you can look at when you were say 8 to 14 years old, 14 to 18 years old, and then 19 to 25 years old. Try and remember things that instances in your past where you for example, you were really good in a report or you put together a package of work that was particularly good. Think about when you were in the zone where you worked on a project or did something, some volunteering where you were totally in your zone and you were pumping out really good.
