Suzy Welch

They just mix them up with virtues.

And then almost no one knows what their actual cognitive and emotional aptitudes are.

And then the problem with interest, which is the third part of the third data set we need to excavate, is that the world is really noisy and complicated, and it's very hard to drink from the fire hose that's telling us what's out there and what's available.

We have to open our aperture and find out what's coming.

And so this is a discipline.

to know what our values, our aptitudes, and our economically viable interests are.

And when we go through that discipline, we can take the difficult step of pushing through the B plus life to see if there is an A plus life available to us.

And I'm not going to say that's true in every single case because you may have constraints, but I think it's available to a lot more of us than we let ourselves think.

Values are very distinct from virtues.

Virtues are social constructs that everyone generally agrees we should all have more of, like kindness, resilience, decency, honesty, goodness.

Values are things that you can operationalize.

Values are personal choices about how we organize our lives.

Values are the underlying desires, wants, and motivations that galvanize our actions.

It's almost like a DNA profile about what's motivating you, and those are our values.

There are three well-known values inventories.

I developed a values inventory at the University of Bristol where I got my PhD, which is called the Welsh Bristol Values Inventory.

It identifies 16 values.

Each one of them will inform your career choices, and it force-rank orders your values from 1 to 16, and it tells you how much you're living each one of those values.

Talk to us now about aptitudes.

Aptitudes are our cognitive and emotional wiring that make us good or better at some things.