What is a Tenet?

If you search for “Core Values” online today, you’re inundated with bullet-point lists of hundreds of words that are no better than opening a thesaurus. They lack specificity, and are thus not useful. In what context? Is this an end-state to achieve or a mode of behavior? Is this something you want for yourself or for others?

For example, “Risk” is not a value. People may like to take risks for some underlying reason, but “Risk” itself is not enough. If risk taking does feel like a precise thing a person wants to do more of, they should contextualize it: “Risk: because it makes me feel alive and helps me avoid living a constrained life — opening up possibilities, and continually surprising myself.”

We want the output to contain core value clusters, actionable statements (tenets?) specific to the domain in question.

Examples

• Autonomy
• Financial Safety: Taking a path where I know I’ll always unquestionably be able to keep food on the table and a roof over my head
• Financial Flexibility: Being able to live a day to day life where I don’t have to constantly check prices with paranoia to make sure I’m within budget
• In control of my Direction: want to feel like I’m making choices out of my own volition, versus feeling “forced” to. Feeling freedom to walk from
• Love & Care
• Prioritizing Loved ones: Want to feel that I’ve prioritized connecting with loved ones and making room for them in my life
• Warmness in the Everyday: Want to feel more general warmness when going through my day, even when conversing with strangers
• Making a Difference
• Making a world more like one I want to live In: Taking actions that make the world more like one I would want to live in
• Inspiring Pride: Want my work to be something I’ll feel proud looking back on, even if it doesn’t turn out how I hope it will
• Swinging for the fences: I want to be putting my time towards things that are not very bounded in their potential scale of success.

More examples

• Intensity and Vividness
• Creative: I want my daily work to involve a creative component. I don’t want to fall into routine.
• Intense: I want my work to be intense – high highs, low lows, long hours, rich with emotion. But not overbearing! It should have the CAPACITY to be INTENSE, but not DEMAND it of me.
• Purpose in Existence
• Meaningful: I want the mission of the company to be meaningful, more than I want every task I do each day to be meaningful.
• Valuable: I want the output of my work to feel valuable to the users. I want the users to be people I care about.
• Respected: I want to be respected by my peers. The type of respect I want is a quiet kind, where either I am helpful, or I am inspirational. If I am inspirational, it’s because I live according to my values and encourage people to do the same, not because people want to copy my actions.
• Differentiated: I want my work to be something few other people (like me) are doing (in the way that I’m doing). This means the cause is either non-obvious, very difficult, or altruistic.

Todos:

Shitty one-word value: "Risk."

Useful Tenet: "I want to be more open to risk and chance in my career."