Values & Success

Our values are built from our life experiences: what we learned at home, in school, at work, and anywhere we spend our time. Our favourite singer, a famous politician, our family and our peers influence our values, whether they try to do so or not. And those values guide our views on our place in the economy.

Some kind of shared sense of success in an economy is useful to create cohesive workplaces, organisations, and sectors. The same way that a sports team or a band can’t work without a shared goal, economic cooperation is difficult when people are working towards different outcomes. Because our economic lives are so interconnected, we often rely at least to some extent on each other to achieve our own successes, and that means having a mutual idea of what that success looks like.

Google that question, and you’ll get 123,000,000 results from business magazines, online forums and memes trying to convey the perfect formula to a ‘productive life’. This pressure to be productive is new, and is by no means universal. But those of us who ask ourselves that questions are to some extent judging our self-worth via how much impact we feel we’ve had on the economy … that doesn’t seem right.