Monday Seven No. 025
Discovering personal values, connecting remotely, and remembering Tony Hsieh
Welcome to Monday Seven, where I discuss and share topics that interested me. For those of you new here you can read previous editions and join us by subscribing here:
The last edition had a 56% open rate. We talked about getting what you want out of life by creating a Life Map. The top link was Julian Shapiro’s What to work on.
Hello and Happy Monday 👋🏽
In the earliest days of building thisopenspace, our team of five huddled over Zoom to spread some holiday cheer and get to know each other. It was December 2015 and we were getting ready to launch.
Our founding team came together only a few months prior. Most of us had only ever met on Zoom. We were navigating new relationships remotely and doing our best to build empathy and get to know the humans behind the screen. Very 2020.
I knew the importance of building a strong company culture from the start.
That afternoon over Zoom, I facilitated an exercise called Mountains and Valleys. It was an inquiry into our personal and shared values. I still remember the experience as an incredible team bonding moment. It accelerated the speed and depth at which we got to know each other. It’s still one of my favorite moments of building a company.
I discovered the exercise after my research into building company culture led me to Tony Hseih, the founder of Zappos. Tony was a visionary and an original thinker. He was known for his unorthodox management style and for creating a unique company culture. Sadly, Tony died this weekend from injuries related to a house fire. He was 46.
I think we can all learn from Tony and am certain his ideas will continue to live on. I hope to help spread some of those ideas here.
This week, I’m sharing Mountains and Valleys—an exercise for discovering personal values, sharing your values with your team, and codifying values into rules of life.
Let’s jump in.
No. 025
1 — Mountains and Valleys: Discovering your personal values
Our values give us the freedom to live as ourselves without fear or regret.
They are the first principles you go back to when you make decisions. They provide stability to fall back on.
Values help you figure out what to do and more importantly what not to do.
So, what are the personal values that are most important to you?
Not the ones you say are important, but those you demonstrate through your actions.
Mountains and Valleys is an exercise that taps into your personal values. The 10-15 minute activity draws from major milestones in your life to help identify your values.
The basic premise is simple.
Your personal values are ones rooted in your lived experiences. Your experiences shape your beliefs, your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts turn into actions, your actions become your habits, and your habits become your values.
The highs (mountains) and lows (valleys) in your life determine your personal values.
The exercise starts by identifying these experiences and plotting them on a chart. Here is Tony Hseih’s Mountains and Valleys from a few years ago:
Once you’ve plotted your experiences, you then think through the values you gained through each experience. In the end, you end up with 10-15 values which further distill down the 5 core values that have come up most often in your life.
The Mountains and Valleys exercise was developed by a management consulting firm CultureSync, but I think its applications are much broader than business.
CultureSync explains the exercise further in a worksheet you can download here:
I believe everyone should complete Mountains and Valleys, and revisit it every few years. You can also use it as the starting point in developing your rules of life which we’ll dive into further below.
2 — Sharing your Mountains and Valleys
Once you’ve completed Mountains and Valleys, try it out with your team or partner.
At thisopenspace, Mountains and Valleys were a part of our new hire onboarding. We encouraged every new hire to complete the exercise, though sharing it was optional. New hires also received a copy of my personal Mountains and Valleys:
There have been new major highs and lows in the 5 years since I created this.
From personal experience, I can tell you that I had a much more fulfilling working relationship with anyone who was willing to open up and share their core values and the life experience that got them there. It is not an easy thing to do, but once you get over the ego barrier the upside is unlimited and the downside risk minimal.
3 — Codifying your values into “rules of life”
Once you discover your values, you can expand on them to develop rules to live by.
Rules are more practical and actionable than values.
For example, resilience is a core value that shows up time and again in my life’s major milestones. It is my leading personal core value. It defines who I am.
But resilience is not actionable on its own. Here’s how resilience looks like as a rule:
Rule #1. As long as you are alive and you are here, you’ll figure out everything else.
Admittedly this is not very good, the language still needs work.
You are doing this for yourself so it does not have to be perfect. As long as your rules make sense to you and give you code to live by, that’s the only thing that matters.
I’m in the process of codifying my rules to live by and still a long way from sharing them publically. I believe this is a lifelong exercise and I still have much to learn.
My goal is to have a set of rules to live by that I can share publically by the time I’m 40 and to continue revising them every few years after that.
4 — Rewatching
Building company culture with Alfred Lin (Zappos) and Brian Chesky (Airbnb).
This is the lecture that introduced me to what makes a great company culture. It was also my introduction to Zappos and Tony Hsieh.
I consider it required watching for first-time founders or anyone who is interested in building culture within an organization.
5 — Listening
Tony Hsieh on NPR’s How I Built This. Originally aired 2017.
6 — Sounds of the week
Cooked Morrocan M’Smen over the weekend and paired it with 70’s Ethiopian jazz. Ethiopiques, Vol. 7: Erè mèla mèla 1975-1978 (Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
7 — Quote
A man got to have a code. — Omar Little, The Wire
Last words
A reminder that we’re posting every other week. The next time you’ll hear from me is on Monday, December 14. I’ve got a few ideas percolating that I am excited to share before wrapping up the year in 31 days. 😳
Thanks for reading,
Yashar