Where value, important, meaning, and purpose come from
Meaning.
Value.
Importance.
Purpose.
What I call MVIP. They aren’t identical concepts, but close enough to consider them together.
Whatever you want in life—money, power, fame, beauty, youth, etc—matters to the extent it overlaps with these things: what it means to you, how much you value it, what importance it has to you, how it relates to your purposes… what MVIP they have.
But think about the last job offer you negotiated. I’ll bet you thought more about the money you’d get than the meaning your work would create for you. Everyone does. Money and those other things are easier to talk about. You can hold a dollar bill in your hand and exchange it for material things. Reporters can write about these things and blast us with messages suggesting we want them for their own sake so they do.
Why do we neglect the more fundamental MVIP? MVIP seems less concrete, more ethereal. You can count how much money you have. It’s harder to measure importance.
Then I realized MVIP is rooted in something more fundamental that you can sense more directly: your emotions.
MVIP is rooted in the emotions you associate with something—that is, how a thing affects your motivations.
Does that make sense? If something makes you feel good, you value it positively. If it makes you feel bad, you value it negatively. Or looking at it the other way, if you value something, you expect it will make you feel good. If you don’t value it, you don’t think it will create much emotional response. If you devalue it, you expect it will make you feel bad.
Whereas MVIP is hard to define and ethereal, you have direct access to your emotions. In fact, you access them more directly than almost anything like, say, beauty, which you experience filtered through your senses.
Think about anything in your life—money, food, tables, clouds… anything. If you want to know what value it has, think of the emotions you associate with it. That’s its MVIP to you. Different people value things differently because they feel differently about things.
If you want more MVIP in your life, learn about your emotions and develop skills in creating the emotions you want. Then you’ll waste less time on things you don’t care about and spend more time on things you do. Most people don’t have much awareness of how they feel. They just react without emotional awareness. They are easy to control and manipulate to buy products, vote one way or another, work, and so on. Easily manipulated people—people with low emotional awareness and skills—get manipulated to do things for others. You can bet when they get manipulated their behavior helps others, but not necessarily themselves. If a commercial gets you to buy Coca-Cola, you know it helps the people at Coca-Cola, but it probably doesn’t help you.
The main point of this blog is to help people develop emotional awareness and skills so they can create more MVIP in their lives and stop letting others impose their values on them. You have your emotional system. No one else’s is just like yours. Know it and use it consciously.
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