What Happened When I Defined My Values

I didn’t set out to become someone who talks about values and intentional living.

In fact, if you had asked me a few years ago what my values were, I probably would have given you a handful of vague but socially acceptable answers and moved on with my day. Family. Freedom. Creativity. Health. The usual shizz.

I knew these things mattered to me in a loose sense, but I had never really stopped to define what they actually meant in my life.

That changed when I was asked a deceptively simple question:

If you only had a year left to live, what would you do now?

I expected an answer to arrive quickly. It didn’t.

And that shook me a little.

At the time, I had already spent years reading around stoicism, mindfulness, happiness, addiction, psychology and self-development. I understood a lot of the ideas intellectually. But understanding something conceptually and applying it meaningfully to your own life are two very different things.

The truth is, I didn’t really know what I wanted because I didn’t fully understand what mattered to me or why.

So I started writing.

At first, I thought I was just journaling. Reflecting a little more deeply on life and trying to untangle the messiness in my own head. But what I was actually doing was defining my values in my own words and returning to them regularly.

And honestly, I felt the benefits almost immediately.

For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I could properly articulate who I was. This gave me greater clarity and confidence in my choices.

That changed something in me.

It gave me a stronger sense of identity. A stronger sense of purpose. I stopped looking at life as something that was simply happening to me and started asking whether my choices aligned with the kind of life I actually wanted to live.

The strange thing was that meaning started appearing everywhere once I knew what I was looking for.

Difficult days still existed. Stress still existed. But I was able to frame them differently. Turning negative or challenging moments into moments of meaning felt like a superpower at times. Not because I was pretending everything was positive, but because I could see why the effort mattered.

That shift gave me courage.

Before this, I had talked about ideas like Mission 52, but I never had the courage or motivation to act. Maybe one day. Maybe when the timing was right. Maybe when I feel more qualified. I carried all the usual stories around not being good enough.

I’m not a writer.
What do I know anyway?
Who would care?

But once I had more clarity around what mattered to me, following through became easier. Not easy, just easier.

Over the last eighteen months, my life has changed significantly.

I stepped away from the agency I had co-run for over fifteen years and moved into solo work because I wanted more autonomy over my time and my life.

I finally hiked in Nepal, something I had wanted to do for nearly two decades but kept postponing for reasons I can't even remember now.

My relationship with alcohol changed. I stopped drinking as heavily on my own, and the internal shame and self-loathing softened. I became more compassionate towards myself and more aware of the different needs driving my behaviour.

I started writing openly about my experiences.

And somewhere along the way, I began building Mission 52 and an app that I genuinely believe could help people live with more intention and alignment in their own lives.

I’m not saying none of this could have happened otherwise. Maybe it would have. But I’m pretty sure the old version of me would have struggled to follow through on much of it.

What’s interesting is that I thought all of this was just my own strange little journey until I started discovering the research behind it.

It turns out there is a growing body of research suggesting that regularly reflecting on personally meaningful values can support psychological resilience, reduce stress reactivity, strengthen identity, improve wellbeing and, in some contexts, even influence physical health. Research into expressive writing and self-affirmation points towards something I had stumbled across accidentally:

When we regularly articulate and reconnect with what matters to us, we change our relationship with ourselves.

That certainly feels true for me.

Looking back now, it strikes me as slightly mad that we are not encouraged to do this earlier in life.

Who would I be now if I had started this process in my twenties?

What opportunities would I have pursued?
What unhealthy habits might I have stepped back from sooner?
What challenges would I have had the confidence to take on?
What people might I have met?

There’s no point dwelling on that too much, but it does reinforce something important:

It is never too late to understand yourself more clearly.

Even in my late forties, I still feel like I am learning and growing in meaningful ways.

And maybe that’s the real gift in all this.

Not perfection. Not optimisation. Not becoming some enlightened version of ourselves.

Just developing enough clarity to move through life with a stronger sense of alignment, meaning and intention.

We owe that to ourselves.

And perhaps we owe it to our future selves too.

Imagine a version of you ten years from now looking back and thanking you for finally taking the time to understand what matters.

What a wonderful gift that would be.