We all know what we stand for. The trick is to state our values clearly - and to stand by them.

That goes both for individuals and businesses. When I was preparing to join the Matter team, the first workshop I gave was about determining a company's values, which are different to its mission or vision. Whereas a mission and vision are a company's north star, its values dictate how it conducts itself.

For example, Google has "ten things we know to be true". Most companies have between five and ten core values that reflect their ethics and the facets of their culture that will lead them to be successful. They're signals about how people should behave inside a company, and they're also signals to the kinds of people who they hope will join them. For example, in 2019, it's a clear and unfortunate signal if diversity and inclusion isn't one of a tech company's core values.

It would be easy to misunderstand this as being about marketing. It's about shared culture, which is the most important thing every organization has to build.

The intersection with personal values lies in the decisions we make about joining or leaving an organization. I won't join a company that doesn't care about diversity and inclusion. And I've turned down very lucrative jobs on high profile teams because it was clear they wanted their employees to spend their lives at work.

We've all got red lines. They're ours alone to draw.

Just as I think it makes sense to pick the company you work for in part based on their declared values, it makes sense to define your personal space in the same way. If your values lean towards community and shared prosperity, it perhaps makes sense that you might not want to spend your time with people who lean towards libertarianism and individualistic success. If you believe in a global world, you might not spend much time with nationalists. If you're an atheist, you might not spend much time with people who believe you have to be religious to be a moral person. And so on.

Perhaps those are extreme examples, but because our values dictate how we behave as we live out our lives and achieve our goals, differences in strongly-held values lead to incompatibilities. If you believe in a very traditional salary-earning lifestyle or traditional gender roles, you might not do well in a relationship with someone who is less motivated by that lifestyle or who actively rejects those roles. Neither side is inherently bad (although one could certainly argue that widespread adherence to traditional gender roles is broadly harmful), but they're incompatible with each other - not necessarily as friends, but certainly as partners in life.

And that's okay. We all get to decide what's important to us. One aspect of contentment is finding the values that work for you personally (regardless of whether they're "the norm"), the values that work for you professionally (ditto), and building a community and a life that will support both things.