Values

Your values are a hierarchy of priority

In the context of your life plan, your values are the way you will describe the order of priority between competing aspects of life.

Value is a measure of preference among a set of things. Just as a dictionary must define a word by using other words, the degree to which you value something can only be defined in terms of the value of other things. Until and unless you explicitly define the ranking of your preferences, it is extremely unlikely that you consistently act toward what will bring you the greatest joy.

Your values give you a method for recognizing and boosting what is most important

Modern life floods you with demands on your time and other resources in ways that extend far beyond what our ancestors faced. Buried amidst the flood of ever-more-complex tasks, limitless information, and constant contacts from others are potential actions that are vitally important: life-changing information to learn, crucial connections to make with people, and critical decisions to make.

It’s easy to expend your resources on what is quick or easy, and most do, but few have developed effective ways to find and act most meaningfully.

What is most important is not always clear. What seems minor might be very important. In fact, this mix up occurs so often that an inability to notice or unwillingness to do those seemingly little things can frequently be the very reason we fail to attain what we hope for in life.

It’s typical to think of many things as equally important, but importance varies quite a bit between the options for action in a given moment. One’s ability to find the needle of what is useful in the haystack of what is not is essential to modern success. Filtering out what is useful requires a method for sorting through the options quickly and accurately. You need a measure of importance. Your prioritized values give you both a way of measuring importance and a method for organizing your response for the greatest impact.

Values are the key to overcoming the tendency to conflate what is easy and fast with what is meaningful. By referring to your prioritized ranking, you can recognize and boost the importance of any seemingly small idea or action that connects to a value near the top of your list.

How to prioritize values

You’ll begin the process of enumerating your values by brainstorming what is important to you. What brings you joy?

Imagine you are your own employee. Imagine a meeting where you are telling your employee what matters and why. What is important? What is more important? What matters most? Try to keep these entries as brief as possible. If you are still stuck, perhaps begin with things you know have low value, and then ask what is more important than them.

Potential entries on your value list might include the well-being of a family member, time spent with a pet or in pursuit of a hobby, or experiencing a feeling.

As you list entries, you’ll want to order them in terms of relative importance. In some cases, you will be able to place each item relative to the others rather quickly, but in others, you will have to compare an entry to the other entries one by one to find its exact place.

The difficulty of your values section isn’t so much in how complete it is or isn’t, as the holes will make themselves apparent over time, but in explicitly setting each thing as more or less important than everything else. It’s probably something you haven’t thought about before.

At the highest level, sort everything according to your purpose: How central is what you are describing to your purpose? How much joy do you or would you experience in the thing described? Order everything in your list from greatest joy to least joy. With each item, you’ll want to ensure that what you have so far is what you would want if you could only have as many entries as you do.

As you work, you might notice several adjacent values might actually be describable under a more generic label. Condense these if you find them. Each person is different, but potential examples of groupings would be several specific aspects of work, several hobbies, or some collection of specific feelings.

Realize that almost all the value you appraise comes from just a few things

It is difficult to act so as to honor the value of many things at once. It produces stress and fragmentation of effort.

Listing and ranking what you value might seem like it is too involved and will lead to too long a list of values. Actually, one of the greatest benefits of this exercise is to realize the falsehood of the assumption that many things matter to you.

The first part of this realization occurs when you reach the point in your values list that you can no longer confidently rank additional items. There is no point continuing to list anything past this point, as you don’t care enough about any of those things for them to be useful in directing your choices. You may be shocked as to how quickly you reach this point.

The second part of this realization is to realize that, according to the 80/20 rule, it is likely that the first 20% of the items on your list capture 80% of the total value you find in your whole list. Furthermore, if you truncate your list to the first ten items, the first two provide 80% of the value of that set of ten.

Your surprisingly short list of values encapsulate everything you care about enough to specify where it is relative to something else, providing you with a clear ordering and a shocking amount of clarity in how to best allocate your resources to maximize what you most value.

Stay true to your values until you have sufficient reason to make a change

As you live according to the values you have listed, you will discover ways to improve your value prioritization. You will add and remove values, and you will shift their prioritization.

As with all parts of your life plan, you alone will choose what you write in this section, and you have full sovereignty to choose what to change and when. Make changes when you have sufficient reason to, but live true to what you have written until then.

Maintaining your written value prioritization under all circumstances will require discipline. You will find that some circumstances make it more difficult to live according to your values than others. Many examples abound, but they can be summarized as a battle between the prioritization you generated in the objective calm of when you wrote your life plan and the subjective environment where you feel a pull to act contrary to what you’ve written. These situations are a question of the tension between rationality and emotion—a topic that will be discussed at length later on because of how often it comes up as you implement various pieces of the life plan.

Just writing out a life plan will give you a rational foothold in areas of your life that you previously paid much less attention to. Thinking about your life plan in these moments will help you remember why you chose the way you did, but even if you can’t reproduce the logic, you can trust that you knew what you were doing when you did, and this will give you strength. The more thoroughly and repeatedly you review and renew your prioritization when you are calm and hopeful, such as first thing in the morning, the more easily you will retain a rational mindset in times you would usually devolve to an emotional mindset.

Two dimensions of value: how important is it to you, and how important is it, really?

How valuable you find something is subjective. Your appraisal of how much joy something provides is an estimate. You probably accept the possibility that you might be incorrect in how much joy you expect from something before experiencing it, but how could this be true for something you already know from experience?

The joy we associate with present or past experiences is subject to retroactive revision. You’ve no doubt experienced this, though perhaps not conscientiously—and certainly without a label—when you were surprised to learn details about a present or past experience that significantly reduced the value of that experience. An example of retroactive revision is how a spouse reinterprets their marriage after finding out that they’ve unknowingly been cheated on for years.

As you proceed through life, you will learn more and more about the actual value of people, things, and situations. As a result, how important different aspects of life will shift, and the more you learn, the more your valuation will approach more closely to objective value.

You will learn more accurate and intense value as you live up to your present estimate of value

The purpose of life is to gain maximal joy, and one part of that puzzle is to discover and obtain what has the greatest potential to provide that joy. Why is that a puzzle? Why isn’t what provides the greatest joy obvious?

Joy comes from value, and our default valuation of things is exceedingly incorrect. If we saw the true value of things, we would have immense joy in things that most consider of very little worth. Moments scattered through each day would fill us with overflowing bliss. Instead, we place massive concern and value on things of no importance.

We improve in the accuracy of our appraisal of value through encountering and correcting deviations from our expectations of worth. As we invest in the cost of what we believe to be worthwhile, we learn what it is actually worth, and how the net benefit relates to other alternatives.

As your appraisal of value becomes more accurate, you will notice a pattern: nothing is both highly valuable and low cost. Value is a function of cost. However, they are not interchangeable, because plenty of low value things also carry a high cost. What we seek are those things that have the highest net benefit—the highest benefit after accounting for the cost.

What has the greatest value also carries the greatest price. The greatest joy comes from the greatest cost for the most meaningful end.

Those who encounter the greatest joy in life do not seek to minimize cost—whether that cost be pain, suffering, endurance, or anything else. Rather, they seek to maximize meaning. As you learn to do the same, you will increasingly prioritize pursuits that carry great costs, but which are still the most worthwhile.

The value you find in life will come from a few very important things

One thing you will discover as your appraisal of value becomes more accurate is that value is Pareto distributed. As a consequence, the value you find in life comes from disproportionately few things.

You’ve probably already seen this pattern, even if you have not recognized it until now. Try to answer the question: “What decisions have I made or actions have I taken that are most responsible for what I presently value in life?” You may be surprised at how much of the value you’ve experienced came from just a few items.

For another important surprise, for each of the main sources of value in your life so far, how many did you recognize were so valuable beforehand or even at the time? The lesson learned: The value of high impact things usually only becomes apparent through time, after the fact.

Because so much value is concentrated in so few things, and because those things tend not to be obvious ahead of time, it is astronomically important to find ways to intentionally seek out highvalue activities, decisions, and outcomes.

While each of the sections of the life plan play a role in maximizing joy, the values section has a special role by providing the necessary ranking to prioritize how resources are used for the greatest joy.

What is productivity with respect to purpose?

Productivity is the measure of efficacy of a productive effort. In the paradigm of the life plan, productivity is a measure of how much joy can be experienced within the finite limits of life.

Human productivity is Pareto distributed: 80% of what matters is contained in 20% of available options, and this pattern repeats in all subsegments: A single task can be more important than all the others combined.

It is highly unlikely that anyone not paying careful attention to prioritization is even remotely approaching how productive they could be. The most valuable activities carry the highest cost, and what is most difficult is the most likely to be avoided. Most people spend most of their time on the most trivial activities.

Because productivity, like wealth, is Pareto distributed, almost all productivity is concentrated in just a small percentage of people, no matter how big or small the sample of people measured. While there are overlaps between wealth and productivity, there are also differences. Not all productivity produces wealth, and not all wealthy people are productive. While you know of some of the wealthiest people in the world, you probably have no idea who the most productive people are. What this means is that while you know how wealthy extremely wealthy people are, it’s unlikely you have any clue just how productive a human can be.¹

Normal people see hyper-productive people as miraculous oddities or examples of overzealousness.² Both perspectives are wrong in serious ways. To see the hyper-productive as miraculous oddities dismisses the fact that it is a choice, and it is something that anyone can do if they learn how and choose to pay the price. To see the hyperproductive as overzealous is to miss the point that normal life can ever bring more than the normal condition, which is obviously inadequate.

Unlike wealth, which is at least a little dependent on outside circumstances, productivity can be taught and its exercise is purely a matter of choice. This is precisely what this book and the life plan do.

Why hyper-productivity is non-optional in the quest for greater joy

A joyful life carries a higher cost than a normal one. Normal people are miserable. They ignore opportunities for improvement, assuming that the future will be at least as good as the present without adopting the improvements that would make it so. Unsurprisingly, their lives cascade into greater overwhelm as challenges unexpected by them predictably occur. Surprises require surplus. If you want to be better than normal, you will have to do more and better than normal people do.

The pursuit of a joyful life requires more time, energy, and rational selection than normal people have. An excellent life requires more than just enough for yourself—more time, more skills, more wisdom, more money, more space, and more stability. And not just for you. The greatest joy comes from helping others, so what you’ll need is more than what you alone need. If you want to save a drowning person, you’ll need to be able to swim well, not just tread water, as it is much more difficult to swim for two than it is to swim for one. Happiness requires surplus, and surplus requires hyper-productivity.

It is convenient to pretend that hyper-productive people have a magical stockpile of surplus time, energy, talent, or will. They don’t. They use the same exact resources normal people have; they just use them in ways that generate much better outcomes.

Hyper-productive people do not base their decisions to improve on whether they need to, but rather whether they ought to. They do the best they can, not the worst they can get away with. They weigh whether the benefit outweighs the cost, and do what is worthwhile.

The life plan framework gives you a way to move towards hyperproductivity by combining faster execution, more effective selection of tasks, and better decision making to compound productivity gains to a point where you will not believe how much you are getting done. The dramatic gains in productivity will be even more shocking when you realize how little you needed to change to obtain them.

Productivity comes through prioritization

Productivity is achieved through what you do, why you do it, and how you do it—all internal choices that you make yourself, and all of which are addressed in the life plan.

The life plan gives you a means of prioritization in every scope of your life by giving you a mechanism for ranking the importance of different demands on your limited resources. By assessing the impact of different options on your purpose, goals, or tasks, in reference to other choices, you can systematically choose what is best. Each of these choices is a question of prioritization.

Great confidence comes through living this way; at any time you will know that your present state of choices best reflects what you truly believe will most directly lead to what is of greatest value to you. You will be free from the worry that you aren’t pursuing the best course, because you will always have a detailed case for why you are. When you know you are doing the best things, you are free from the anxiety caused by not being able to do all things.

Prioritizing what you want

The life plan is intended to transform your life into what you value the most through who you are, what you do, and what you have.

Often our desires contain mutually exclusive things, but almost no one realizes when the many things they desire compete with one another. Making your priorities explicit helps you see when the pursuit of one thing you want detracts from the pursuit of another, because as you spend the extra time and thought elucidating how to obtain what you want the most, you will also see previously hidden conflicts in what it will take to get what you want almost as much.

A great deal of resources are wasted on low value pursuits because people make the mistake of comparing the value of what they choose to doing nothing. The reality is that the cost of every moment is the highest value action that could occupy it. Most choices fail to measure up when compared against the potential action of greatest worth. Every decision in life is a tradeoff, and far more often than you realize, there tends to be something within the set of possible choices of much greater worth than any other option.

The best way to improve your choices is to spend more time thinking about them before you make them, ideally when you are far away from the situation in which you’ll need to make them. The more time you put into making and rehearsing detailed prioritizations of what you value, the more likely you will be to follow those prioritizations in the moment of choice.

Being honest about what you want

It isn’t unusual for someone to actually want something other than what they say they want. As you live your life plan, you are going to face this situation every time you have to choose between acting as the person described in the plan or acting in some other way. When you find yourself swept up in circumstance, remember that you’ve already thought this through. However you might feel in the moment should be subordinated to what you already planned, until and unless you have information that differs from your understanding when you made your plan. Even then, odds are you should still follow your plan until you’ve had a clear headed moment to revisit your plan.

Unfortunately, the most common outcome for people who find themselves wanting to deviate from what they understand to be best is for them to pretend to have a rational basis for what is really an arbitrary emotional position by complicating the situation, ignoring facts, or otherwise bending the truth. With enough of a smokescreen, they can persuade themselves that what they know isn’t best is still worth doing.

There are two solutions for such challenges. The first is to become more honest about what you want and why you want it. The choice to be truthful is one each person must make for themselves. The second is to increase the strength of your reasons for wanting what is better.

When you want to change what you want, find something that matters more to you than what you are tempted to choose instead. Find something that you consider more important than what you want to pivot away from. Hold to those reasons in times of temptation.

Prioritizing what you want the most

Desire is a limited resource. Any desire you orient toward one thing cannot be shared with another. There can only be one thing you want the most at any one time—even if you are inconsistent in what it is, whether you intend it or not, whether you are aware of what it is or not, and whether you like it or not.

It is possible to desire multiple things at once, but any amount of allocated desire cannot be shared with another objective at the same time. Too often, the reason you have not received something you desire is that you don’t desire it enough to do what it takes to obtain it, because that desire is already allocated elsewhere.

One of the greatest detractions from obtaining what you want in life is holding mutually exclusive aims that ensure you will never make significant progress in any one of them. Even when values are not mutually exclusive, they still compete in the sense that you can only do one thing at a time, and therefore everything has to be more or less important than everything else. It is uncomfortable to think about competing options for our concern this way, but realize that there is no other way to act: every choice is an exchange. Even when you don’t realize it, every choice is the preference of something above everything else.

The word sacrifice has been corrupted to mean something you go without. In reality, it means to increase the priority of something you do not yet have such that it replaces something you do. For example, to sacrifice something for your children means to value providing that thing to your children over whatever it will replace.

Needing to choose one option necessarily means not choosing another, but you should not feel as if these revelations of conflict are an experience of loss. Remember, the value of something must be denominated in the things we view as less valuable than it. The more value you sacrifice for something, the more value it will have to you.

Whatever you don’t have is always a result of either not knowing its cost or not having paid it. You will obtain everything that you desire above its cost, provided you possess an accurate enough belief to describe how to obtain it. Even when you want something more than anything else, you still might not want it enough to meet or exceed its cost.

You are unlikely to achieve anything worthwhile without devoting your full attention to it for at least a span of time. The greatest outcomes in life do not tolerate competition. They require your full attention. Anything that requires everything prevents the contemporary pursuit of anything else. The greatest pursuits cannot succeed while you are only partially committed, or while you simultaneously seek lateral alternatives that sap your limited resources away from the main pursuit.

To make something your highest priority means it is what you want no matter the cost. If there are constraints, such as certain things you would not do or timeframes you would not endure to obtain it, you can’t say it is your top desire. Rather, the constraints are.

This point about constraints may seem subtle to some, but it is very important. Most people are riddled with constraints, most of which they’ve never thought of explicitly. The addition of each constraint on a desire decreases the probability that a complying solution exists. One of the benefits of the life plan is that it helps you be more explicit about the constraints you set, making it more possible to obtain what you say you want the most, as well as revealing when you actually want something else more.

The wrong kind of sacrifice happens when you sacrifice higher priorities for lower priorities. This kind of sacrifice breaks authenticity, and it causes a host of outsized problems within and around you that can be hard to trace to their source. Don’t violate more important priorities to obtain lesser priorities.

Prioritizing your impact

Peak productivity requires that you intentionally direct your attention to the most important things at the most effective times. The less intentionally your highest impact efforts are planned and promoted, the more likely you are to focus on what is least important.

Not all action is equally effective. What you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it matters so much more than just whether you are doing something or not. If you want to achieve peak productivity, you will have to learn to optimize what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.

Productivity is not a question of activity, but impact. Counting hours is much easier and much more consistent than counting actual production, but reality is not directly effected by the amount of time that you commit to a task. Busyness is not progress. Those who conflate productivity with activity are assured to have a dramatically lesser impact than they otherwise could because they will prioritize additional time and effort as its own benefit instead of measuring the outcomes that actually matter. Satisfaction comes from impact—not activity, and not number of activities. Always focus on what has the highest impact. Focus on outputs, not activity.

Even hard work is no guarantee that you are advancing your purpose as much as you would some other way, if at all. Examples abound where less time on task under the right circumstances can yield dramatically better outcomes than more time would. Effort is only progress when it advances your purpose, and does so more than any other possible action.

Prioritization is the key to knowing what to say no to. Focus is a question of saying no to everything other than what is most important. You have to learn to say no to the things that matter the least in order to have the time to do what matters more.

Productivity requires that you orient your actions most directly towards your purpose. You will be most productive as you navigate the opportunities and obstacles in the landscape of your life as you would using a compass to head due north in the most efficient way given terrain features on a map.

Prioritizing your time

Like other resources, time provides a measure of our priorities. How do you spend your time?

Peak productivity requires efficient use of your time for the highest impact. Perhaps the most common perceived barrier to more of what you want is time. All good things take time, but there are so many demands on our time that there never seems to be enough. There will always be more to do than you can do. There is always enough time to do what matters most, but with none to spare.

Intentional living will increase how much time you have. By pivoting your use of time to more productive ends, you will enjoy significant increases instant and long-term meaning in your life. It’s well worth the minor cost of paying attention to how much time you spend on your activities.

You are probably only aware of a fraction of the wealth of time, activity, energy, and emotion you presently waste each day because, apart from what you know you waste, there is so much you expend on something other than what is most important to you.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention on things that do not matter to them and do not generate progress on what does. Odds are that you waste hours per day, everyday, on things that do not matter at all to you. It’s quite likely you don’t realize how much time you are spending on things you would be embarrassed about. You might want to keep a log of your time spent over a few days, or at least check your phone activity record or your web browser history. As an experiment, write out how you spent your day yesterday, and identify the most important 80% of the impact of the day. You will find that those moments occupied only around 20% of your day. Just think how much extra time you would have if you replaced how you spent most of your day on tasks that produce greater meaning.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention worrying in ways that do not actually change their situation. So much time is wasted in worrying instead of acting³ that it is no exaggeration that adopting more effective ways of thinking, feeling, and acting could leave you with as much as two or more times the time and energy you presently feel limited to. Imagine if you could double the time and energy you have!

You can’t even scratch the surface of your true potential while you are burning countless hours on activities that do not contribute to advancing your purpose. Every minute you waste on meaningless activities will obviously reduce the amount of meaning you feel in your life.

The tools provided in this book will help you look at how you presently spend your time with new eyes. As you apply the lessons in this book, you are going to find that great sums of time are available to recover that are presently being used in ways that are far less efficient than they could be, or used on things that don’t matter nearly as much as they currently seem to. As unbelievable as it may sound, you may find yourself feeling as if you have found an entire extra day’s worth of time each and every day by applying the lessons in this book. Imagine what you could do with another day each and every day.

Prioritizing your emotions

What is most desirable in itself is almost always limited to the short-term and almost always least important long-term. Consider, for example, how desirable it is to stay in a hot shower on a cold morning. How long will you remember the pleasure of spending an extra ten minutes in that shower? The whole purpose is for the other things you will complete in that day—things that contribute meaning that will last weeks, months, and even years.

What is most important is almost always least inherently desirable and most difficult. Its value must be promoted through identifying its connection with goals, values, and transcendent purpose in order to boost the motivation to complete it. Without this intentional promotion through linkage to what is more important but less obvious, you will default to short-term, pleasure-centric activities.

How whole-heartedly do you attack the things that matter most in the long-term? How boldly do you charge into what has the highest long-term actual value, and not just the most obvious short-term value? If you don’t feel like you are flowing when you are working on what you understand to be most important, you are suffering from a misalignment between your mind and your heart. Spending time and thought to analyze what you are doing and why you are doing it will help bring what you do and what you want into better alignment. Much more will be said about emotions in a later part of this book.

Prioritizing your money

Like other resources, money provides a measure of our priorities. How do you spend your money? Do you spend money based on what is important to you, or do you spend money based on having it? On paper, make a quick sketch of a pie chart showing how you spend your money. If you need to, do the research to see how you spent your money over the last month and the last year. Credit card and bank statements are quick and easy resources to verify your spending.

Do your purchases show that you are looking ahead and planning for recurring and potential needs, building an increasing store of savings and investments, or does your spending tell a less intentional story?

Do you have a way to prioritize funds and protect the expenses that most closely serve your purpose? Tools might include a budget, automatic transfers to named accounts, automatic bill pay, and so on.

Most people spend reactively. When you fail to look ahead and anticipate costs, you will spend a lot more money than someone who does, even if you spend it on all the same needs. It’s very difficult to take advantage of discounts, sales, and multiple bids in an emergency. The savings available goes far beyond obvious things like getting multiple bids on a roof repair: most things, from cars to clothing to food to cosmetics can be purchased at a discount by taking advantage of opportunities like sales, clearance, or unexpected rare events.⁴

When you spend intentionally, you don’t just adopt the spending habits of others. You spend according to what matters most to you. You think outside the box, evaluating atypical options that free up funds from what matters less to reallocate to what matters more. For example, you move if there are less expensive living situations that satisfy what is important to you. Consider the long list of considerations! Different geographical locations have tremendous differences in cost. If you aren’t in a less expensive area, is it because it provides something more important to you than the money you would save? If you live in a more expensive domicile than alternatives, is it because you intentionally decided that what it provided was worth it to you? What other options exist? When is the last time you looked? If you have a house and a mortgage, your insurance situation can easily save you thousands per year. When was the last time you shopped around to see if you can get a better deal on your homeowner’s insurance? Do you really need the coverage you have? Would a higher deductible or even reducing to the minimal coverage required by the mortgage make sense in your situation? If your home is paid off, would it make more sense to forgo insurance and simply save/invest the money you would otherwise burn on ever-increasing premiums with no return?

Think about your healthcare situation. How essential are the doctors visits you make? How essential are the prescription drugs you take? Are there alternatives that provide greater net benefit? What health coverage, if any, do you have? What alternatives exist? Is there an option that better fits your needs and costs less?

Think about recurring monthly services and fees. What monthly services do you pay for, and are they worthwhile? For example, consider cell phone costs. Most people are on cell phone plans with companies that sell the same service on the same network under a discounted brand. Newly released cell phones offer a much higher price than older but still newly manufactured cell phones, and plans are typically loaded with expensive options like insurance and streaming services that provide questionable value for most people. Do you really need additional lines for your children? Does that provide value beyond the cost in additional money and the considerable damage research has convincingly shown it causes to their well-being?

Think about your transportation situation. Do you have a very old car that costs more to maintain than a newer car would cost? Do you have a very new car that costs more than a slightly used car would cost? Do you know the cost per mile of your car over its lifetime, and did you pick it based on that, the sticker price, or something less important? Do you have more than one vehicle, and if so, have you calculated what it costs you to operate, maintain, and insure it, and is it worth it to you? Are you confident that what you are paying for insurance is the best deal you can get? When was the last time you got multiple quotes for car insurance?

Think about your charitable giving. Who do you give money to, and why? How much of the money goes to the cause you are attempting to support? What value does it provide? Are there better opportunities that would yield greater value?

Many more examples abound. Dissect your whole financial life and rebuild it according to what you value and why you value it.

Sometimes, your purpose requires you to adjust your priorities

Prerequisite situations will adopt the priority of what follows them. You will find that there are cases where you will need to transfer the priority of one thing to another related thing. For example, if you urgently need to take your car to the mechanic, but need to shower before going out, taking a shower takes upon itself a higher priority than it normally would.

Commonly, work with others generates many such prerequisite situations. If another person is waiting for your work in order to continue with something very important, your work will adopt the importance of the value it has to them.

Another source of value transmittal is in the value a thing enables. Consider the meaning a father finds in paying the mortgage because of what it enables for his family versus the importance he places on the house itself.

Finally, consider boosting your consideration of the priority of anything that provides long-term efficiencies, whether that be something that grows resources, increases resilience, or reduces friction. For example, if you need to organize your garage, maybe building a set of shelves is more important than it might seem, since the aggregate emotional friction of seeing the mess each time you pass by it is greater than the trouble to build the shelves. Always prioritize for long-term benefit.